


The Town

by Jankenpopp



Category: Darkest Dungeon (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2019-08-03 21:01:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16333409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jankenpopp/pseuds/Jankenpopp
Summary: To reach Heaven, one must journey through Hell, there to strike down its minions...or escape damnation well earned. The cursed county of d'Auseil is beset by monsters and madness. Only the mad and the monstrous can hope to cleanse it, if indeed they survive.





	1. The Job

“You expect me to drink this?”

The tavernkeep shrugged. “New customers pay up front. You can feed it to the crows for all I care.” He squinted at the tankard he’d been polishing, digging around in his bushy mustache for a vague memory of dinner.

Dismas looked back into his own tankard. From the smell of it, he guessed his ale held clearer memories of the vagrants who had obviously mistaken the kegs for latrines. He drank it anyway, and found to his relative pleasure that he only had to chew twice. The slop crawled, burned, and limped down his throat as he let his eyes wander.

It wasn't a remarkable sort of tavern. Dismas had been in many, enough to have noticed two different philosophies chief among tavernkeeps. About half the time, the quality of the joint would be totally inverse to the tenor of its name. The Ravished Redhead, though it sounded lurid, had been a cozy (if poorly lit) venue in a wealthy quarter insulated from obvious crime and poverty; a rich man's idea of poor accommodations. A more remote inn called the Imperial Diamond had caught fire the night Dismas had stayed there - the owner’s attempt, he’d heard later, to rid the tumbledown hole of a pervasive blowfly infestation.

Other times, a tavern’s name told you exactly what you were paying for. Hence this place’s complete failure to surprise Dismas: the smoky interior, the filthy tables, and the flea-bitten patrons were characteristic of a place formerly called the Hello Stranger, of whose sign nothing remained save the first four letters. Ah, well. The place was indeed warm for all its filth. If the name weren’t much of a surprise in either direction, at least a roaring fire could be.

The torchlight cowered before a blast of chill air. A creak of wood and a roar of wind heralded another customer’s arrival. Dismas barely shivered as the autumn licked at his back, despite the threadbare overcoat he wore, despite the thinning hair he’d resolved never to miss. Instead he raised his drink.

“To the quick work of friends. I won’t have to finish this swill after all.” 

The door swung shut with a bang, a brief accompaniment to the unmistakable clank of armor. Dismas’s companion never seemed to take the damn suit off. How the man had fathered a child was totally beyond Dismas, and he was content to leave it there. The tavernkeep acknowledged the new arrival with a nod. Then another nod.

That caught Dismas’s attention. He shifted in his seat, turning to see who his traveling companion had brought with him.

The seat two down from Dismas had been filled by a mountain of rust and tattered cloth. Sir Reynauld’s hair was permanently mussed from the helmet he’d set on the bar. He would have thought it looked rakish, Dismas thought, if he’d cared what women thought of his appearance. Which he hadn’t since the wars. With an easy smile to go with the hair, Reynauld nonetheless looked like the farm boy he’d once been. “My friend, I’ve found-”

A scruffy, elderly man clambered onto the seat between Reynauld and Dismas, mocking the former’s smile with a grotesque rictus grin. “So you’re the new heroes!” His expression had exacerbated the symphony of wrinkles scarring his face, creasing them permanently in place. “Ah, truly no greater warriors have graced our humble home!”

Dismas looked the old-timer up and down. The man was a monument to decay - his black frock coat speckled with holes, its embroidery half torn off; his beard in tangles, framing a permanent, toothy smile; tiny pince-nez, askew and cracked. His breath came in wheezes, and were it not for the crazed fire in his eyes Dismas would have pegged him inches from the grave. This husk seemed to be animated by pure force of will.

Or insanity, Dismas allowed, as the stranger licked some drool from the corner of his mouth.

Reynauld cleared his throat, unperturbed. “I’ve found us a job. No sooner had you and I parted ways than I met this gentleman down by the well.”

“And in good time! I’d just finished relieving myself,” the gentleman chimed in helpfully.

“What do you know of this town?” Reynauld asked, clapping a hand on the ancient man’s shoulder.

Dismas sighed. The holy purpose of a Crusader did not involve getting to the point. “It’s a festering hole.” Reynauld’s smile grew on one side, his patience infuriating. “And the local lord’s mad. What’s this about?”

Reynauld planted an elbow on the bar and raised a finger to correct him in that one way he had, damn him. “Not the local lord. His grandfather.”

“Great-great-uncle!”

“Of course.” Reynauld patted the poor man’s shoulder patronizingly. “His great-great-uncle was something of an archaeologist.”

“The hell is that?” Dismas said.

“Professional grave robber. Now, this man had some vaults under the mansion needed excavating. He brought men and women from far and wide to dig and dig and dig, and what do you think he found?”

The man between Reynauld and Dismas leaped to his feet. “Horror! The armies of the damned! Oh, the calamity would drive you to slash your wrists and drown yourself gibbering in your blood!”

The clatter of his fallen stool froze the tavern in place. Reynauld and Dismas had a few seconds to absorb the vivid imagery. By the speed with which conversations and drinking resumed, Dismas surmised that this behavior wasn’t unexpected of their new friend. He gestured at him with his nigh-untouched tankard. “Where does he figure into this?”

“Ah! Forgive me,” the old man said as he bent with audible pops and cracks to retrieve his seat. “I’m the caretaker for Master Veruna. The maintenance of the estate and its debts and upkeep...that all fell to me, until he returned! Very hands on, the master is, though I still find ways to make myself useful.”

A snort from Dismas. The caretaker was making himself a mess.

“You’re familiar, of course, with the misfortune that’s befallen these lands…”

Dismas waved a hand up and down. In recent years he’d scorned his fellow brigands for taking a contract from the lord of these parts. Going legitimate was one thing, but turning mercenary was quite another. Travel in and out of this place had pretty much dried up, even before the rebellion the lord had hired the brigands to tame. What few travelers passed here passed as quickly as they could, given the ugly rumors about what had driven the peasants to rise up. Times were hard in this corner of society, harder on its predatory fringes, and Dismas was treated to a rambling rundown of this hamlet’s woes and what the new lord thought could be done to help.

The caretaker’s wheezes sounded a little more labored, so Dismas slid him his distressingly viscous ale for some measure of relief. He almost heaved at the sight of the wretched man gulping it down like water in a desert. He turned his attention to Reynauld. “So the old lord woke up some monsters.”

“Correct.”

“And we’re to put them back to sleep.”

“In the name of the Light.”

“Why can’t the brigands do it?”

“They haven’t recognized the new lord’s authority.”

“He’s not the one with the cannon,” Dismas guessed. Every so often he’d heard it ripping through the surrounding forest air, and wondered what beast his former colleagues had been hunting. Or what innocent person. An even more cynical version of himself would have said there was no such thing, but these days he knew better.

Reynauld rose and cocked his head, inviting Dismas to the end of the bar as the caretaker slaked his thirst. He had a gleam in his eyes Dismas was certain he disliked. “Look,” Reynauld said, dropping his voice. “Do you remember what you told me the first day we met?”

“‘If your god is real, why the hell are we here?’”

“After that.”

“‘A tithe for your life, holy man.’”

“After.”

Dismas could already see where this was going, and it was useless to dissuade Reynauld when he’d decided on the direction of a conversation. Churchmen were like that, in his experience. “‘If you’ve got a better line of work, I’m all ears.’”

“You’re all ears!” Reynauld seized Dismas’s shoulder with one hand, pointed at the caretaker with the other. “And more, my friend. We may not have known each other long, but I’ve seen what it is you long for. If there’s one thing common to all men it’s a thirst for a purpose. The caretaker, you, myself...here, in this village that cries out for salvation, is where our destinies converge! Him, to serve his noble master...myself, to defend the children of the Light and strike down Her foes...you, to redeem your wayward soul!”

“Reynauld, have you met the lord?”

The fervor of the zealot had rendered Reynauld immune to discouragement, though his eye twitched a bit as the question percolated. “Well, no,” he admitted. “I’d scarcely left you by the time I met the caretaker.”

“Right,” Dismas said. “Reynauld, that senile goblin over there just asked the two of us to go into a haunted castle and kill gods only know what, for a man we’ve never even seen. When I met you, I was waylaying travelers for gold. Ideal? Hell no, but at least I knew the stakes. Men were men. If I succeeded, I ate that night. If I failed, it was my head and mine only.”

“Yours only?” Reynauld asked pointedly, holding Dismas’s gaze.

It was remarkable how much ice could hide within the fire of a Crusader’s faith. Reynauld’s eyes were hard now, windows on a heart that no argument would pierce. Yet that same look drove back at Dismas like the dirk sheathed at his hip, stoking with Reynauld’s one question the million that swirled within Dismas all his waking hours and into his dreams.

Is there anything you won’t do?

What did they ever do to you?

Do you think they’re still where you left them?

In an instant Reynauld’s eyes softened, smiled with the rest of his face. “That is nothing you need fear, friend Dismas. Never forget that alone, even the mightiest hero’s strength may fail. And you are not alone in this journey. We find the strength to continue in the hearts of our allies, our brothers in arms.” Reynauld embraced Dismas now, a steel bear crushing a leathery wolf in its grip. The meaning was clear, but Dismas couldn’t help but gasp for breath. Damn it, was everyone mad around here? Was it just the human condition?

Another freezing wind whistled into the tavern. Reynauld relaxed, chuckling. “Or sisters in arms, as the case may be. We are not the first heroes to arrive!”

Dismas followed Reynauld’s gesturing hand to the entrance, taking in the newcomers. Sisters, indeed; one in a literal sense, as evidenced by her plate mail and dull green robes, her eyes hidden by the hood of her sororal order. The other was bundled head to toe in black with an odd birdlike mask, barely recognizable as female save for the slight curve of her chest and her hips, around which mysterious pouches and tools hung from a thick leather belt.

As the caretaker whirled to greet them and introduce the four, Dismas ruminated on Reynauld’s question. Had he seen what he thought he had? What had he told the Crusader? Nothing, after all. No, Dismas yet lived alone with his guilt, and none of Reynauld’s bloody intuition or faith could suss them out. The old highwayman had been seeing things.

So why was he introducing himself to the women? Why did he agree to travel to the ruined keep a day’s ride from here? What did he hope to find, stumbling along the flagstones of some desecrated hellhole with some failed doctor, a penitent nun, and a man who believed in angels?

Why, whatever it was, was it any better than what he was running from?


	2. The Usual Suspects

The Old Road was rough at best. The town’s unlikely saviors bumped and rattled down a road rife with rocks and branches, their wagon shuddering at the smallest obstacle. Since setting out at dawn the cracks, creaks, and groans from the forest around them had long since ceased to startle; about every fourth such sound seemed to come from the wagon itself anyway, which boded better for their survival if not their convenience. It was a long walk back to the hamlet if the wagon finally broke down, and the emaciated horse pulling it was unlikely to do more in that event than add to the weight.

“I’ve never been so cheated in my life,” Dismas grumbled again. “Administrative costs, my road-beaten arse. Veruna should be paying us for the privilege of cleaning house.” The packs of food and torches were stamped with the crest of their employer’s venerable line: a tower on an escutcheon of red, black, and yellow, surmounted by a sort of black sunburst. The whole effect was rather like a crown of thorns upon a storied seat of power, and like the suffering martyrs of the scriptures, the lord needed money.

“‘Forsake not potatoes in thy quest for diamonds!’” called Reynauld over his shoulder. He sat up front, driving their suffering beast. “Saint Hugonne said that. Our employer’s only asking twenty percent of the take from our expedition.”

“Which means he really is loaded and just needs us to get to it, or that he expected us to render up a healthy profit before conveniently dying.” Dismas crossed his arms and leaned back into his corner. “It’s a foolproof racket. Probably do it myself in his position.”

"More’s the pity that you fell for it.” The doctor’s voice was slightly muffled by her medical mask, but its sardonic lilt was gallingly familiar to Dismas, it being his native dialect.

“Last I checked, Badu, you’d bought your hayride ticket long before I came to town. If I wanted your opinion, I’d sneeze a little.” Dismas pulled his rust-colored neckerchief a little tighter against the chill, shivering. The weather was getting worse, he had to admit. “Say, why do you doctor types wear that thing?”

The disquieting effect of the bird skull staring out from the mass of black cloth was surely not lost on Badu. She scratched out another line in a ratty green notebook, letting Dismas stew in his own question. Finally she snapped the book shut, letting the skull stamped on the front have a look as well. She tapped the beak of her mask with the tip of her quill. “Standard plague doctor’s attire. We keep medicinal herbs in the beak to ward off miasma and disease.”

That seemed remarkably insane to Dismas. How could smelling flowers all day help someone covered in boils or bleeding from every hole?

"It also gets us through wagon rides with men who haven’t bathed since their first fuck.”

The barb took Dismas by surprise. That he laughed was the surprise of it. “One more reason to visit a city someday. Start the whole process over.” He pointed lazily at the fourth member of their band, who hadn’t looked up from her holy book for almost the past hour. “Where are our manners? She’ll be left out of this conversation.”

“The honor of a Vestal is unimpeachable!” It was anyone’s guess as to whether Reynauld had been listening. Most of his contributions since dawn had been of the platitude variety, about the virtues of the Light or the righteousness of their cause. Whatever got a man through the day, Dismas conceded, though he was gradually resolving to one day use the Crusader’s holy crosses for target practice.

Her name was Dorothea, and she was a Vestal - one of an order of nuns tasked with keeping the holy flame burning at their abbey. Supposedly they were all virgins, and even this far from civilized society Dismas had heard that the flame fed on the bodies of those who broke their vows. A ludicrous prospect, both the vows and the stories around them, but people did strange things in cities where other people were watching.

Badu waved her quill vaguely in Reynauld’s direction. “Friend of yours?”

"Suppose that’s true.” Dismas wasn’t sure what else to call a man whose life he’d threatened the previous week; a man who’d bested him in combat, then repaid him by saving his hide from the brigands whose toll they’d politely refused to pay. Forgiveness was a strange concept to men who dealt in blood and shadow, but if it kept him alive Dismas would take it. He certainly hadn’t given himself any.

“I like him.” Badu opened her book and resumed writing. “He’s honest. You don’t normally see that in the living.”

"The living?” Dismas reckoned there weren't many of the other type to talk to.

“The human body doesn’t lie. Only the consciousness driving it.” It was impossible to tell by Badu's expression, but a reverential note seemed to have crept into her voice, and she was picking up speed. “One constructs identity and desire and emotion - duplicities all - to mask the fragile truth of one’s flesh. Imagine that - the human brain denying its own baseness, pretending to a higher purpose for the mind than its enslavement to the humors that govern it. Language, religion, ambition...all are laid bare before the scalpel, when the arrogant mummer Man lies cold on the operating table.”

Silence reigned in the wagon. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath. As Dismas grappled with the lunacy he’d just witnessed, he became aware of another voice whispering somewhere to his right. Unnerving as it was, he decided to pay attention, having no earthly idea how to respond to Badu right at this moment. Content with this state of affairs, the doctor returned to her notes.

To Dismas’s surprise he found the voice belonged to Dorothea, whose prayers had been so soft as to go completely unnoticed over the previous hour. She cradled her book like the child she would never bear, ghosting her fingers across the pages as if to dust her fingertips with some residual holiness. Those Vestals were a devout bunch and renowned for their healing. Even so, a mace the length and thickness of a man’s thigh rested in the straw next to her. If that weren’t just for show, she’d be no slouch in combat either.

Dismas had questions about that. But Dorothea was at prayers, and irreligious as Dismas was, he knew better than to interrupt the crazies at their crazying. Why else had he let Badu get going?

That just left Reynauld. As gratingly optimistic as only a god could tell him to be, he was comparatively sane company. Dismas moved on his knees to the front, steadying himself against the railing of the cart, and leaned against the seat back, staring up at the brilliant blue sky. It really was a-

“Lovely afternoon, is it not?” Reynauld nodded down at Dismas, picking up the thread of conversation easy as a needle. The Crusader had obligingly gotten the pleasant part out of the way.

“Not where we’re going. Suppose we should enjoy this while we’re above ground.”

“I’m told the ruins are short on windows,” Reynauld agreed. “It makes sense, of course. Anything bigger than an arrow slit or a murder hole, and you invite the enemy into your fortress. Why, if you had been there at the siege of Aljazeth-”

“What’s her deal?” Dismas pointed to Dorothea. Her head was bowed, though her lips no longer moved. “Think I’ve heard more words out of our horse all day.”

“She’s at prayers.”

“No shit.”

“Nones, Dismas. The ninth hour after dawn. Her order keeps strict canonical hours, though she herself is obliged to only a part of the full liturgy.” The Crusader flicked the reins, encouraging the horse to a burst of slightly less sluggishness. “The Light hears her voice and acknowledges her continued devotion.”

“Not something you can stock up and let lie for a few days, then.”

“Certainly not. We are all sinners, and we must all repent in different ways. For a Vestal, whose temptations are constant...the rules are more stringent.”

Dismas raised an eyebrow, watching Dorothea as one might watch a bird building its nest against a hard winter. She was as still as she could manage on the uneven road; had her hair not been covered, Dismas would not have blinked if every strand remained in place. “Constant, you say?”

Reynauld took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “The full meaning is not mine to elucidate,” he said more quietly. “Suffice it to say that one's character is not innate, but rather a series of choices. As for briganding, so for celibacy.”

Poor girl, Dismas thought. Spending one's whole life with one's nose in a book and chastity firmly intact. Some people just lived by different rules. That was why he'd taken to briganding.

“Ah! At long last. Whoa, girl.” Reynauld tugged at the reins, drawing the horse to a halt. Dismas perked up, standing and looking where Reynauld pointed. Badu tiptoed up behind them, finding space for a view of her own. Dorothea stood then, her prayers finished, and left the cart with a clatter of plate and a thud of her book closing, going to watch from the horse’s shoulder.

A journey begun at dawn had brought them at last to the clearing the caretaker had told them of - carved from the forest like a shovel-scar in a grave, its cracked brown earth devoid of grass and surrendering to a steep cliff rising at the far end. The area was cicatriced with dead firepits and jagged fortifications, crumbling walls and arches mounting higher and higher unto a dead fort carved from the stone of the cliffside itself. There had been little need to quarry for the building - though age and disuse had cracked and pitted the stones, they had been been beautiful in their day, hewn from the existing rock by cutters long since lost to living memory.

Dismas whistled. “Place looks like a fuckin’ tomb.”

“It is.” Badu was rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, betraying the excitement her mask concealed. “Even before the old Lord Veruna killed himself, they whispered tales of this place at the university. Rumor had it,” and here she began to flip through her notes again, “that the old lord practiced necromancy here.”

“Necromancy?”

“Raising the dead.” Dorothea’s voice was flat and nearly unrecognizable at a normal speaking volume. “The perversion of the Light’s gift of life for fell pursuits. May the Flame burn those who practice it.”

Reynauld nodded his assent, dismounted, and slid his visor down with a clank. “We are the Flame, Sister. The Light shall guide us to the fuel.”

The four moved the horse and wagon into a sheltered spot near the entrance and began unloading. The religiously inclined bore the bulk of the burden - food and torches - while lighter fare like bandages and empty sacks went to Badu and Dismas. They'd trade perishables for the treasures that waited within...or so the caretaker had said. The veracity of his stories of jewels and coin was still a matter for debate and inquiry.

Dismas regarded the entrance to the ruins much the same as he'd once regarded a heavily protected carriage train. This time, of course, the quarry was greater, and its guardians already dead - even if no one had gotten around to telling them so.

They passed under a great stone canopy that sagged dangerously atop pillars the height of four men. Broken statues and empty windows lined the sides of the entranceway, glass and sculpture alike wearing away to dust. The stones were uneven where they had not been torn free of the packed earth, and everywhere was the musty smell of decay: paper, wood, perhaps even flesh. A doorway was set into the wall before them, flanked by busts long since ground featureless. The door that had once stood in the frame lay before it like a lumpy welcome mat.

“Someone's gone and saved us the trouble of breaking in,” Dismas remarked as they paused before the fallen door.

Reynauld’s armor squeaked a bit as he nodded uncertainly. “I would like to think so. Unless…” He approached the frame and examined the places where once the door’s hinges had been bolted to the stone. They were missing, replaced with great gouges in the frame. Reynauld knelt to examine the door. The hinges were askew and badly bent, and the wood itself was splintered and cracked. The abuse was on the side that would have faced the interior.

“Whatever destroyed this door wasn't trying to get in,” Reynauld concluded. “It was trying to get out.”

The air was sick with thoughts of what that might mean. Dorothea crossed herself and held her mace aloft, muttering a prayer that set it glowing dully. Dismas slipped a hand into his coat, feeling for the familiar shape of his flintlock. The gods alone knew what it would do to a thing already dead, but better to have it and it be useless than the other way around.

“The question is...what is it? And where is it now?” Reynauld continued, his thinking aloud hammering home the point in a way that Dismas had yet to develop a taste for.

“Waiting,” said Dorothea. Two questions, one word. If nothing else, faith was efficient.

Only Badu seemed distracted. She flicked her gaze from the broken door to her notebook, scribbling hypotheses as the variables multiplied.

_Cadavers, walking right to us. And the University complains of their rarity._


	3. The Ruins

They were not welcome here. The ruins seethed corruption, every inch repudiating the life that had once walked these halls. Tapestries hung in ragged strips where they had not been looted from the walls. Rubble littered the corridors from failing arches and holes in the ceiling. All this was discovery after sudden discovery to the four explorers-for-hire, who beheld this abandoned place fire by fire as flint struck tinder and torches were placed in what sconces remained. The growing light revealed bricks divorced from masonry, fallen braziers absent coal, bones bereft of bodies; obstacles that were easy enough to navigate in the comfort of torchlight but whose shadows writhed obscenely across walls long immersed in the dark.

Dismas eased a bullseye lantern into a room off the front hall. Something brushed his face and he flailed wildly at it, only to find his hand sticky with cobwebs. “Place could use some cleaning.”

“It wants _cleansing_ ,” Dorothea muttered, adding her glowing mace to the light from Dismas’s lantern. They were looking into a small room whose purpose could only be guessed at; more of a cell, really, though it had been made more cramped by the collapse of the table and chair within.

She was right, though Dismas knew their priorities differed. Everyone’s did. Badu had been picking her way down the hall, studying bones through a jeweler’s lens and tossing them aside. Occasionally she consulted her ever-present notebook, but little seemed to interest her beyond the remains. Further down the hall the blackness retreated before the onslaught of the invading light and marshaled itself anew, and it was into this amorphous mass of shadow that Reynauld strode - one hand holding a torch aloft, the other hovering near the hilt of his sword.

“Wait.”

Dismas turned at Dorothea’s voice, having written the room off as empty. “What do you see?”

The Vestal pointed her mace at a small urn set into an alcove on the opposite wall of the cell. It was ribbed with bands of gold - real gold, given its refusal to tarnish like all the other metal here - and shaped like a hooded angel holding up a bowl filled with what looked like gray dust.

“Ashes?” Dismas said.

“Ashes. Someone had the misfortune to die here.” At Dismas’s skeptical expression, Dorothea clarified. “These urns are used in forts, churches, and other such places to hold the remains of those who lived and eventually died there. A shame that this is no longer a suitable resting place.” She bowed her head and muttered a prayer.

It was a shame, from a certain perspective. But dead was dead, as far as Dismas was concerned. He decided to leave the mourning to the professionals and withdrew from the cell to search for gold he could actually spend.

Dorothea remained behind a moment longer. Then she too moved to explore anew. She stopped in the doorway, biting her lip against guilt. They were here to rescue the new Lord Veruna’s wealth, not to reclaim his ancestral keep for the Light his ancestor had forsaken. Hardly a mission fit for her journey of repentance. But it was a long way from one diocese to another, and she'd gotten to the local abbey before the new staff had arrived to accommodate her. Fiscal realities made an errand girl of one seeking to repair her virtue.

“When is the appointed time for an act of kindness?” Saint Sonnenbach’s question was rhetorical, gnawing at Dorothea’s soul like the sins that had sent her to the furthest, darkest corner recognizable as civilization. She thought she'd better answer it before her group pulled too far ahead of her. She fished inside a pocket for a vial of holy water and crossed the tiny room to the urn. Another prayer, and she sprinkled a few drops into the ashes. The Light only knew if they had ever been consecrated.

The ashes stirred.

A brief, beautiful hope flashed within Dorothea’s heart; perhaps it had been a trick of the dim light. But again the ashes quivered, then slid aside, as a spider the size of her hand shook itself dry and skittered up out of them.

Dorothea swallowed a scream as the spider, emerald green and faster than its bulk implied, fled the urn. Then it leaped at her and she vomited the scream back up.

\--

It was really quite sad. Reynauld couldn't help but open his heart to the fate of these ruins, once a stalwart beacon of hope in a world so often beset by despair. How these halls must have thrived, he thought. What valiant charges and defenses had been conceived here? To what defenseless souls had the fort given shelter?

Something glinted at the extreme right of Reynauld’s vision. What monsters had since taken up residence here? He pivoted and had his sword halfway out of its scabbard when he saw that it was merely an antique cabinet, shoved behind a pile of rock as if out of the way of a collapse. The glass on the door was cloudy, but intact.

Reynauld whistled. Would their quest conclude without even a sign of the evil that now held sway here?

He looked around. Dorothea and Dismas were peering into some room about thirty yards back; in the middle of the hall, Badu picked through the twisted ruins of a chandelier, the unfortunate only one of the four that had crashed to the ground.

Yes, it was safe. He walked quickly over to the cabinet and held the torch close, squinting into the glass. A bust of an unknown man; a small portrait of a woman - an old Veruna, judging by the crest on the tapestry painted behind her; perhaps that same tapestry, folded crisply and taking up the shelf below. And there, between bust and portrait, was a little glass box that held three round blue gems that glittered in the torchlight.

Jackpot.

Reynauld tried the cabinet door. It didn't budge. He jiggled the handle. Locked. He stepped back, about to call the party over. Didn't Dismas carry a lockpick?

By the Light, those sapphires were pretty.

Reynauld sighed. It certainly wouldn't be his first time. And besides, how many of these was the house of Veruna sitting on? Certainly more than anyone knew of. What untold charities could they buy?

Reynauld had just found a suitably sized rock to bash the glass in when a scream nearly made him drop it. In a blind panic, he smashed the glass and tossed the rock aside before the sound had gone. It was still echoing through the hall as he shoved the box of gemstones into his pack.

“Dorothea!” Reynauld called, jogging back up the hall as fast as he could move in his armor. “Answer me! Are you hurt?”

The party converged around the fallen chandelier, against which Dorothea had collapsed, breathing hard and sweating. Badu was examining her hand as she rifled through one of her pouches. Dismas was swearing and loading his pistol, standing sentinel over the women, his lantern forgotten at his feet.

“By the Light, Sister, what happened?” Reynauld knelt beside Dorothea, only to have Badu shoo him.

“Don't block my light! She'll be fine, I just need to find...there!” The doctor produced a green cloth and a bottle of the same color liquid, clasping the former over the neck of the latter to soak. “Antivenom. Hold this on the wound. Need some good in there with the bad, it won't clot otherwise.”

Dorothea did as she was told, pressing the cloth to a nasty bite on her left hand. It throbbed like a thing dying and stung mightily when the antivenom set to work, but the pain quickly faded into numbness.

“We found a crematory urn. Little bastard spider was asleep in it when Sister Bleeding Heart decided to make friends.” Dismas glared around at the dilapidated hallway, lantern aloft. “Could be any number of them in the cracks and corners.”

Badu looked up from wrapping Dorothea’s hand in a rapidly reddening bandage. “What did it look like?”

“Big, green, ugly. What the hell’s it matter?”

“Like this?” Badu finished her work and stood, flipping through her book and pointing at a diagram on a recent page. A perfect charcoal sketch of the spider reared back on its hind legs, fangs dripping with poison.

“The University told me these might be here,” Badu said. “Where is it now?”

“Dead. Dorothea flattened it.”

“I didn't ask if it was dead. I asked where it was,” Badu snapped. “We need to burn it before more come.”

“More?” gasped Dorothea.

“They're necrophages.”

Dismas gave an exaggerated shrug.

Badu swore. “They eat dead things. See this?” She snatched a stray femur from among the bones littering the floor and tapped it. “Hollow. Not an ounce of marrow in these. They're hungry. And now there's a fresh corpse somewhere in here, species be damned.”

“Badu, for shit’s sake, they're spiders!”

“Do you know the word for a group of spiders?”

“I don't know, a shitload?”

Badu couldn't visibly roll her eyes, so she tossed her head in frustration. Halfway through the motion she spied something behind Dismas and froze. “A cluster, actually. But yours seems apt.”

The dread was familiar to Dismas. It was the sort of despairing uncertainty that gripped a man’s gut when he heard the click of a pistol that wasn’t his and wondered what was on the other end of it. He swallowed his anxiety and turned around.

The smashed corpse of the spider slid into the party’s view, pushed and kicked with a wet scraping sound across the floor. Two larger spiders were behind it, batting at each other with large, hairy legs and chittering with irritation as they battled for control of their fallen comrade. One red, one green, both roughly the size of a cat, they were flanked by others of their color, large and small, battle lines dissolving into a bizarre arachnid melee that spilled into the center of the hall. To the party’s growing horror, the average size of the spiders increased as more boiled up from unknown hiding places. Within seconds the main hall was half full of the high-pitched song of these beasts, two races of dog-sized spiders squaring off among an uncountable swarm of their lessers.

It was enough to turn the stomachs of all save Badu. Three of the party were no strangers to death and killing, though of the human variety; only one had made a passion of the savagery and viscera of life. Even so, she recognized the threat. “Dismas!” she hissed. “How’s your aim?”

Dismas didn’t dare to move. He hesitated to even breathe too hard, lest the lantern’s shaking light draw the attention of the things. “I could take out two, maybe three of the big ones before they got here. Why?”

Badu rifled through her pockets and pouches, checking her equipment. “We need to distract them. If one of the big ones were to die-”

One of the big ones caught sight of them. It slapped an opponent aside and pointed with one great bristly leg, halting the fight with a high, rattling screech. With a sickening rustle, the horde of spiders turned their attention to the intruders. Eight times as many eyes sized up their targets.

With an echoing squeal like a fork scraping a plate at the bottom of a well, hundreds of enormous spiders flowed across the rubble toward their first proper meals in weeks.

“Into the halls!” Reynauld roared. He pulled Dorothea to her feet by the upper arm; she shook him off, healthy enough to walk, and set off running at his side. The Crusader passed his torch and snatched it - still sticking straight up from a gap in the stones - and chose a direction. Badu and Dismas broke into a dead sprint, flitting impossibly over obstacles, nearly tripping but keeping their balance in the blessed torchlight.

A corridor branching from the left side of the hall was alive with bobbing light. Badu reached it first. She slammed gasping into the doorframe, keeping an eye on Reynauld and Dorothea as she waved Dismas over. “Make it count!” she cried.

Every grain of black powder that Dismas fumbled was a pinprick of doom in his stomach. He poured half a cartridge down the muzzle, rammed a ball down after it, took careful aim. His hand shook as he leveled his pistol, pitiful against the army of spiders, but he fired true. A huge red one shrieked as its face was obliterated. It collapsed blindly to one side, still writhing and spitting as it disappeared under a greedy carpet of smaller beasts. The spiders surged forward, undaunted.

Dismas laughed. He would have screamed otherwise. Then he bolted, brushing past Badu as he took off down the hall after the dimming light.

The passage was barely wide enough for two people side by side, with iron doors set at regular intervals along its length. The ground was a mess of books and papers. Archives? Who knew? Who cared? They were keeping ahead of the spiders, but one dead end or twisted ankle and there’d be a brand new set of bones decorating the ruins.

“Any better ideas?” Dismas spat as they caught their breath. He and Badu were panting at a fork in the hallway, one eye on the advancing spiders, one on the dancing light of their companions. Badu paused and eyed Dismas carefully. Then she shot out a hand and grabbed his belt.

“What the-” Dismas batted her away. “Not the time or the place, you crazy-”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I need your lantern!” It was almost a relief to let her unhook the bullseye lantern from his belt - it had been banging painfully against his leg the whole time they’d been running. Badu pulled a knife from inside her robes and poked a hole in the bottom, letting the oil leak out. Then she grabbed Dismas’s hand and pulled him after her, shaking the lantern as they went. Every few feet she pulled a vial from a big pocket and dashed it to the ground, shattering glass and fluid on the dry papers.

They came to the end of the hall after thirty more seconds of running, nearly falling down a steep set of stairs. The hall terminated in a dizzying flight of stairs that spiraled down into darkness undisturbed by light, a yawning pit of nothing that threatened to swallow them whole. Dismas could see Reynauld and Dorothea on a landing a hundred steps below them, pausing for breath and lighting an abandoned torch. He nearly jumped off the stairs when Badu grabbed his shoulder. “Whoa!”

She held up one more vial. “The last of my holocaust oil.” She shoved it in the chamber of Dismas’s lantern and slammed the whole thing down on the landing. “When we’re halfway down the stairs, you shoot this. Don’t miss.”

He didn’t care to question her. In seconds he’d taken up his appointed spot and was priming another shot. As he took aim, he noticed that Badu had crept up behind him, staring intently at the lantern. “Can I help you?”

She shook her head. “Do what you need to. I want to watch.”

If that was the maddest thing he heard, saw, or experienced today, Dismas would take it. He snarled a few choice curses, closed one eye, and let out a long, slow breath. Then he fired.

The ball smashed through the vial, showered the landing with Badu’s witch’s brew, and ricocheted around the inside of the lantern. Sparks flew.

The landing exploded.

Dismas shielded his eyes as blue fire engulfed the top of the stairs. His ears rang from the explosion and the dull _whump_ of air rushing in behind it, his skin prickled with heat, and he clung to the wall to avoid losing his balance and plunging into the bottomless doom below. As he blinked away the afterimages seared into his vision, he heard a series of similar explosions, the sound of the chain reaction dying away as it tore further down the hall. The rhythm of Badu’s hellstorm undergirded a chorus of inhuman screams as the spiders drowned in flame, cooked alive by the hell the mad doctor had created.

The explosions were still echoing throughout the stairwell as Dismas slowly faced Badu. “What in the name of hairy, horned  _fuck_ did they teach you at the University?”

She was giggling behind that mask of hers, the crazy bitch. “Not nearly enough. Why do you think they expelled me?” She started down the stairs, waving him after her. “Now come on. The others are waiting and we still haven’t found the zombies.”


	4. The Rest

Somewhere around the stairs, Reynauld had lost his old torch. He’d had a split second to keep hold of it or to grab Dorothea’s hood when she slipped on the edge of the staircase, and only the most selfish nyctophobe would dwell on that decision. Dismas’s lantern was gone too, a casualty of Badu’s solution to the spider problem. The stone still smoked and glowed like coals in a brazier where the holocaust oil had ignited. The hallway they’d come down wouldn’t be safe for a while, though none of them could say how long that would be.

That left the stairs, fading behind them the further they walked down the new hallway; Reynauld’s last torch, seeming all the brighter for its lonesomeness; and Dorothea’s mace: the sole remaining sources of light in the abyss the four had run blindly into. This new hallway wasn’t as cramped as the one that had led to the stairs, but it was no less dark, dusty, and disheveled.

“What in the world happened up there?” Reynauld said, looking over his shoulder as he led the group down the hall. “I thought the heavens had come crashing down upon us.”

“Ask the good Doctor. It was her idea.” Dismas followed carefully in Reynauld’s footsteps, cleaning his pistol in what little light they had.

“Holocaust oil. I invented it back in my University days,” Badu stated proudly. “Extremely low flash point. Highly volatile. I probably couldn't even walk outside with it during the summer.”

“May I ask what it's for?” Dorothea brought up the rear, mace held aloft in case any spiders had somehow braved the inferno.

“That wasn't enough of a demonstration?” Badu sounded like she was pouting.

Dorothea was unamused. “Man is corruptible, fragile. Such destructive power is not his to command for its own sake.”

“Thank goodness I'm not a man!”

Now that the immediate danger had passed, Dismas wrestled with an unfamiliar bout of relief. Whatever Badu had cooked up had worked. But it had done nothing for Dismas’s initial impression of her. The woman was madder than a cat in a barrel of nails, and no mistake.

“The way here is shut to us. We’ll have to wait for the fires to die down or find another way out,” Reynauld said. “A shame I was unable to secure the little treasures in the entrance hall. Family heirlooms, if the crests were any indication.”

“Perhaps all is not lost.” Dorothea offered. “I doubt that anyone who kept valuables here would have put them all just inside the front door.”

“What’s the over-under on the take from this, anyway?” Dismas slipped his pistol back into his coat. “Enough to buy me a new coat? Reckon this one’s a bit singed.”

“You’re welcome.”

The bickering simmered in that vein for a minute more. Though Reynauld’s torch warmed the hall somewhat, the air began to cool the further they walked. Finally they emerged into a room, low-ceilinged but with a sunken floor. Eight steps led down into the center, which was ringed by a balcony that led to other rooms to the left and right. Their footsteps became muffled as they moved from stone to rotting carpet. The center of the room held a large stone sarcophagus upon a dais, and bookshelves crammed with thick tomes lined the walls all around. And across from the entrance…

“A fireplace!” Reynauld crossed himself and lifted his head in praise. “Truly we are blessed.” He crossed the lower level and held the torch within the little stone alcove. “No wood, of course, but there’s no shortage of kindling around,” he said. “Bring me some of these books?”

Badu clutched at her chest in horror. “Are you mad? Think of the knowledge surrounding us right now!”  
Dismas rolled his eyes. Dorothea shook her head. “We’ve more immediate need of light and warmth.” She hung her mace at her side and pulled a book from the wall to flip through. “This one’s an almanac. Used to time harvests two centuries ago. If you’d like to help me judge its cousins, by all means do so.”

Half an hour later, a pile of almanacs, facsimiles, and double-entry ledgers was burning merrily in the fireplace. Although Badu was still sulking, she’d conceded that none of it was truly irreplaceable. The room had warmed up and even become somewhat welcoming, if one were to ignore the enormous sarcophagus that dominated it.

“Who do you suppose lives there?” Dismas asked at one point. He’d tried to make out what looked like an inscription on one side, but it had been struck off by some less historically inclined visitor.

“The way here was open, and for all its grandeur the chamber is fairly austere.” Dorothea had just finished vespers, as close to the evening hour of prayer as she could estimate. “If I had to guess, this is the final resting place of a castellan or a majordomo. Someone responsible for the running of the fort, but without a noble title.”

Reynauld looked up from stirring the stew in the cookpot hanging over the fire. “Which abbey did you say you hailed from, Sister?”

“Our Lady of Virtuous Regret. In Vandrelles.”

“The library there is the envy of the surrounding dioceses. You must have been on the archival staff.”

“We rotated.”

Dismas tuned out the shop talk. The fire was welcome and the smell and prospect of dinner had his mouth watering, but he didn’t approve of the idea of rooming with a dead man. That went double if they weren’t certain he’d stay dead.

He was cleaning his blade for lack of anything better to do. As ever, his pistol was in perfect working order. He hadn’t even needed to break out the grapeshot rounds; they would have been useless against the spider horde anyway. Dismas’s reflection glowered up at him from the steel; his dirk was by far the cleanest thing he owned, in stark contrast to the work it had done, the work he had done.

Dismas adjusted his grip on the hilt. In the shiny surface of the blade, he saw a female figure staring over his shoulder. The woman had no eyes.

With a shudder and a curse bitten back, Dismas whipped around to see Badu standing outside the circle. The mask kept her eyes shielded behind thick glass that reflected the firelight. He relaxed, if only slightly. “Give a guy a heart attack, wearing that.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Badu deflected. “Maybe even come to like it. Behind this mask is the answer to the prayers of the sick and the dying.”

“If they’re praying to have the life scared out of them.”

Badu shrugged. “I did a thesis on euthanasia.”

Damned University nonsense. “I’ll take first watch,” Dismas said to the room. “If half of what we’ve heard about this place is true, there’s no telling what could still be wandering around down here.”

The vision of the no-eyed woman was not unfamiliar to Dismas, and he was not ready to chance sleep with her still so fresh in his mind, waiting to prey upon his dreams. At least this time she hadn’t had her child with her.

\--

The tomb had gone black, save for the red rumors of flame gnawing at a charred manifest. The air was still, disturbed not at all by the sleeping breath of the four explorers. Badu leaned up against where two bookshelves met, facing the corner; her notebook had slipped off her lap some minutes ago. She’d let her hood down and loosened her mask, which rested upon her chest. The air was stagnant and tinged with earth, but it could get quite stuffy under the vestments of her occupation.

A soft scrape on stone jerked her violently awake. Badu gasped, looking all around, the truth of their tenebrous surroundings invading her conscience. When had she fallen asleep on her watch? There was no way of knowing, and the fire had nearly gone out. Badu scrambled to her feet, not even bothering to fix her mask. Blindly she felt along the bookcase, grabbing a sufficiently thick volume and thrusting it into the fireplace.

“Come on, come on. Stupid, stupid, stupid…” she murmured, speaking the poison that she’d invited into her heart. This was her fault. She fumbled for the ratty bellows Reynauld had used to get the fire going.

Another sound of movement, this time on what was left of the carpet. Badu counted to three, swallowed her apprehension, turned to face behind her. A figure stood there, its shape indiscernible; dressed, perhaps, in robes that obscured it. Its side bulged oddly, as if a weapon or a tool hung from a belt. Badu put two and two together. Next watch had been…

“Dorothea, don’t scare me that way,” Badu sighed. She allowed relief to assuage her guilt. The Vestal didn’t respond. “I know, I neglected my watch. It’s my responsibility, and we’re just lucky nobody came creeping up while we were here.” She hesitated. Dorothea was still skeptical of her, doubly so now, but she thought she could ask at least this of her. “If you’ll look away...I prefer to keep the mask on around others,” she said. Finally she found the bellows and stuck them into the embers, blowing and hoping.

To her relief, the fire gained purchase, tentatively lapping at the desiccated pages. The new meal yielded to the hunger of the flames, resurrecting the light once more. Warmth began to seep back into the room. With a satisfied smile, Badu stood up. “Your watch, then, friend.”

The firelight revealed her sleeping companions. Reynauld was sitting up beside the fireplace, still in his armor, one hand on the hilt of his sword. Dismas had fallen asleep on his side with his back to the cookpot while it had still been warm. And there lay Dorothea on her back at the base of the dais, hands folded on her chest, holy book resting on her hands.

Badu looked into a skeletal husk of a face. The animate skeleton was dressed in moldy robes that might once have been an impressive raiment, its fur-lined collar matted with rot, a matching biretta sitting lopsided on the scalpless head. At its side hung a long knife, and in its left hand it carried a rusted goblet.

All skulls were created equal, Badu knew, but it was remarkable how this one could somehow manage an expression of malice. The object of her curiosity stood before her, yet in the face of death deferred she was speechless.

Then it splashed the contents of the goblet in her face.

Badu was frozen for a shocked second before giving voice to a scream. The shock of the unknown fluid blended with a full-face stinging sensation bled into the sizzle of the stuff upon rough scar tissue. She nearly stumbled backward into the fire, rubbing violently at her face with a corner of her hood. When she felt she’d sufficiently dried herself she buckled the mask back on and put up the hood again, just in time to see her companions leap up from their sleeping places.

By then it was already too late. The returning light of the burning book revealed others like the sly skeleton. The fringes of the room teemed with raggedly clothed creatures of bone and dust wielding pitted, rusted weapons, and the wavering, foggy sight Badu’s injured eyes showed her had transformed the dead thing before her into another corpse entirely.

\--  
“Wake up! They are upon us!”

It was a truly bleak example of Reynauld’s gift for stating the obvious. Dismas kicked over the cookpot when he stumbled to his feet, but the stabbing pain in his toes obligingly melted into cold panic. With a large book to feed upon, the fire lit up the room once more, this time illuminating an ambush.

Dismas saw a legion of walking dead infesting the upper level of the room, saw them beginning to spill into their impromptu campsite. Age-worn skeletons shambled down the stairs, clad in rags and brandishing simple weapons; some armed with clubs, others with rust-spotted swords. The click and rattle of bone stood in for the shouts and profanities of battle, ever more present without the necessity of breath to sustain them. By Dismas’s count there were ten, maybe twelve of the things, but the fireplace threw teasing tongues of light to the room’s entrances, where lurked countless more.

Reynauld took up a position on the dais, shouting Dorothea into place beside him and calling for Dismas and Badu. Over to his right Dismas could see Badu shaking her head, clawing at the edges of her mask, as a mean-looking bastard in once-fancy robes tossed a goblet aside and drew a knife.

Whatever Reynauld wanted, it would have to wait. Without a pause for thought, Dismas lunged for the fancy skeleton, whipping his dirk from its sheath. The monster’s stab was clumsy, and Dismas caught its blade on his and grabbed it by the shoulder. It was simple enough to use the horror’s momentum to throw it into the wall beside Badu with a crunch of brittle bone.

By this time Badu looked to have calmed down from whatever madness had gripped her. Her shoulders rose and fell with shallow breaths, and she was muttering to herself, staring down at the stunned skeleton.

Dismas grabbed Badu by the arm and shook her roughly. “Eyes up, Doctor. There’s more coming.”

She wrenched her arm from his grip and pointed down at her assailant. As the skeleton shook itself and regained its balance, Badu’s voice rose from unintelligible whispers to a breathless cry. “You...no! I cut you up! I’ve seen your fucking lungs! You’re dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!” She leaped on the skeleton and bore it again to the carpet, nearly knocking Dismas aside. Shock was an impossible luxury in the middle of battle, but Dismas couldn’t help but linger on the insane sight. Badu had pulled a wicked-looking knife from her belt and was plunging it again and again into the dead thing, ripping her voice ragged with hellish, angry screams.

Though its skull jerked and the jaw snapped in protest, Dismas concluded that Badu had the situation under control. He bolted to the sarcophagus and took up a position behind it. “How fucked are we?” he said as he loaded his flintlock.

“That is for us to decide, my friend!” Reynauld crossed himself. “Though a little help from on high never goes amiss.”

Dorothea pointed at the upper level. “It won't be long before they start climbing. We will break through and secure the staircase after I've finished.”

Finished what? Dismas had only to think it before the answer announced itself.

Her book was the size of a small writing desk and open in her left hand, mace at the ready in her right. The Vestal murmured words that were foreign to Dismas, but which set the letters glistening white on the page. As the skeletons flooded in around them, she raised her voice to a ringing shout, thrusting her mace aloft as it flared like a tiny sun.

Light exploded in the firelit tomb, though somehow none of the humans present needed to shield their eyes. The mob of skeletons visibly broke before the holy assault, their momentum crumbling as they shielded their empty eyes. A lingering instinct from life? Nobody had time to theorize.

Dorothea had barely shouted “Go!” before Reynauld loosed a war cry and launched into the undead horde. He ran one down with a shoulder charge, stabbing his blade straight through its skull before it had hit the ground. In one motion he withdrew it and beheaded another enemy; it stumbled and flailed, cracking a fellow’s sternum with its club before it too fell.

Bright as it suddenly was here in this necropolis, the light was already steadily dimming, along with Dorothea’s mace. The dead were shuffling around again, regaining their senses as her opening move wore off.

The Vestal pointed her mace to the right. “Aroint thee!” she yelled. A dazzling beam arced from the tip of her mace, its remaining light channeled into a radiant bolt. A skeleton had gotten one leg over the upper level’s railing; it was caught in the shoulder and thrown back into the crowd in the hallway.

The pause it gave the skeletons was enough. “I will see to Badu. Go with Reynauld!”

Dorothea didn't have to tell him twice. Dismas closed his eyes, spat a curse, and vaulted over the sarcophagus. He made for Reynauld.

The Crusader parried and hacked in equal measure, a student of the decades of war in the East. He bodily forced back several skeletons right before Dismas came up behind him, announcing himself with a pistol shot. It struck an undead in the face and sent half its cranium spinning into the melee. The thing collapsed, looking almost as surprised as Dismas felt.

Small comforts, he thought, small comforts. This thing works on them after all.

They found themselves back to back in a temporary clearing as the skeletons reassessed the threat. Reynauld's tabard was streaked with blood where they'd snuck past his armor, but he twirled his sword in triumph nonetheless. “Well struck, comrade! What of the women?”

“The nun's fetching the doctor. Badu's mad, but she's armed, and that seemed to be working out.”

“Right. We advance, slow and steady. High ground is our best hope!”

They took the stairs step after chaotic step. Reynauld's divinely inspired strikes shattered advance after advance, while Dismas alternated sharp elbows with wicked slices at age-weakened joints. As they reached the top they saw Dorothea and Badu running to join them; the doctor had one arm around the Vestal, though more for guidance than for apparent injury. The assassin that had started it all was lost under a steady stream of bony bodies pouring over the balcony behind the two.

In moments they were reunited, each holding down one choke point: the exit, the stairs, the balcony on either side. “All right, Badu?” Dismas said.

“He's dead,” she said icily, almost as much to herself. “These things...these revenants...they cannot be left to infest this place.”

She'd sure changed her tune, though Dismas couldn't be bothered to care why. “Anyone hurt?”

“Scratches, little more,” Reynauld stated manfully.

“Good. I say we cut our losses and-”

The room shivered. A thud echoed from down the hall they'd come from. Then another. Then more. The skeletons paused their swarming, instead forming up and brandishing their ruined weapons.

“Something's coming,” Reynauld said.

Nobody needed to hear it. The footsteps grew louder, joined soon by the rattle of metal on bone. Dismas squinted down the dark hall, trying to see. He was grabbed round the shoulders and shoved to the side.

Only Reynauld's quick action saved Dismas from a concussion or worse. He raised an arm and smacked aside a scrawny skeleton, thrown like a sack of twigs from down the hallway.

The Crusader fixed his eyes on the darkness and planted his sword between two stones. The sound of prayer filled the room, and blue fire wreathed the old blade hilt to point as he spoke. The skeletons cowered on all sides before the holy light, and Reynauld stood tall and immovable before it, as much a tool of the Light as he was its stalwart wielder. He cast a long shadow over the whole room and shouted now over the din of the approaching monstrosity.

“For it is in faith that we find our strength! Courage, unshackled by doubt! Valor, tempered in Hell's hottest furnaces! Break, break, ye waves of demon-kind, upon the bulwark of-”

An enormous spiked mace caught Reynauld full in the stomach. He doubled over with a wet cough and was tossed through the air like a dead rabbit. The crash of armor on stone announced his impact on the dais; he had hit the ground hard enough to dent his battered plate. The sword glowed uselessly on the ground between him and the stairs he'd been cast down.

The rest of them barely had time to retreat back downstairs. The mace's owner lurched into the room: an eight-foot hulk of solid bone, skinless face leering from a suit of armor like a stack of metal barrels. It smashed the ground with a weapon the size of a battering ram and rumbled down the shaking stairs to kill.

Dismas gulped. “Shit.”


	5. The Return

The tomb was a frenzied dance of wood, bone, and steel. A small army of dead surged into the center and recoiled just as quickly, splintered before stray strikes from friend and foe alike. Dismas and Badu had been corralled into the space before the dais in the middle, though precise slashes at sinewless joints served to neutralize what attackers they did not outright destroy.

Dismas gritted his teeth against a gash across his shoulder. It wouldn’t be enough. The skeletons were beginning to pick their engagements more carefully, and the wounds would continue to mount.

On the steps of the dais Dorothea stood vigil over Reynauld’s body - alive, but badly beaten - to draw the giant skeleton’s attention. Her lips moved continuously, weaving a battle-born hymn that kept her on her feet. Her song tussled with a staccato of whoosh and crash as the giant’s mace sailed through empty air or smashed into stone. She did not try to block. Reynauld had proven it folly. Soft green light rippled around Dorothea as she sang, sealing cuts from weapons and flying chips of stone as she dodged killing blows and weathered glancing ones.

A moment’s lull in the chaos found Dismas back to back with an ally again, Badu this time. “Wish she could toss some of that our way,” he remarked.

“Shoulder bothering you?”

“Little bit.” Dismas sundered a skeleton’s spine with a shot, sending its top half tumbling. He crushed its skull under his boot.

Badu drove her knife up through another’s jaw. Strong she was not, but she put a whirl into the motion that ripped the skull clean from its owner and sent it flying. That left her free to rummage around in another of her pouches. “Keep them off me and hold your breath.”

“Why the hell-”

She held up a brown ball about the size of a sparrow, stitched from strips of leather and slightly misshapen. “Just do it.”

Dismas stepped in and crossed blades with a skeleton with an eyepatch before it could gut Badu standing.

As Dismas took command of the fight, Badu studied the rhythm of Dorothea’s desperate defense of her brother in the faith. There was only one chance to get this right, and poor aim could kill the Vestal horribly as easily as save her.

Badu raised her arm and threw. An experiment wasn’t a failure if taught you something. It was just a question of what she would learn.

\--

They were overwhelmed, outnumbered, exhausted. Dorothea's church and faith riveted her to this impossible battlefield, defending a wounded brother until he could rise once more. To the death, if necessary. Yet she had only to trust in her divine purpose, she knew, and no demon could strike her down. The Light had guarded her through peril after mortal peril, and her faith had yet to waver.

But it had before, hadn’t it?

The doubt was intrusive, insidious, and a quarter second of it was enough. Dorothea’s hood was ripped off by a swing she did not deserve to dodge. Her hair was torn from its scarf, falling loose over her right eye as she shouted in surprise. There was no pain, she was dimly aware, but a sudden wetness on her scalp told her that she was bleeding.

She took a step back, then another, freezing as she nearly tripped over Reynauld’s unconscious body. Icy dread clutched at her heart as it convulsed with failure. Once more she had allowed her devotion to falter. The skeleton’s aim had improved, and Dorothea’s losing game of dodge and distract was proof enough that she had deceived herself. The Light had brought her here to show her the true extent of the weakness of her spirit.

Her flesh had been proven unworthy once before. The Light spoke in patterns and prophecies, and the last time her hair had been let down-

Green smoke engulfed the skeleton’s arm, raised for a killing blow. Dorothea ducked a death that did not come for her.

When she looked up again, it was the monster’s turn to retreat. It stared empty-eyed at its arm as its armor rusted and flaked away beneath a mold-like patina of sickly green. Through fraying, disintegrating fabric Dorothea could see the stuff eating away at the creature’s bones. It fixed her again with its frozen grimace and raised its mace once more.

Halfway through the fatal swing, its arm snapped off at the elbow with a dry, wooden crack. Though the strike went wide, it smashed the sarcophagus with enough force to knock the lid open and gouge a hole in the side.

The clangorous impact of dissolving bone and metal reached Reynauld, causing him to stir. Dorothea saw him move at the edge of her vision. She steeled her grip on her mace and lunged, pouring her strength into a swing at the disarmed horror.

It caught the strike on its left bracer. The denting crash echoed across the melee, and the thing gave ground. A false step sent it stumbling, then tumbling down the steps, falling toward an unlucky combatant.

“Dismas!” Dorothea cried, too late.

The highwayman knocked back a skeleton to look, just in time for an even bigger one to fall on him. It caught his right side and threw him grunting to the carpet. His dirk flew from his hand, skidding across the floor to be kicked around by fleshless feet. Instinctively he punched; useless, against the helmeted skull turned halfway around and snapping like a rabid dog. His knuckles smarted from the blow, but that was the least of his problems. The skeleton's bulk was like a dying horse pinning him to the ground, thrashing about in the throes of a death long since reversed.

The world to Dismas was a flurry of troubles. So close to the ground, all he could see was the legs of his companions in a sea of bones. The skeleton crushed the air from his lungs as it scrambled for balance; he clenched his teeth against the musty scent of decay; he slapped the ground again and again with his empty palm, as if someone would kick a weapon back into it.

Miraculously, someone did.

His hand came down on an unfamiliar hunk of metal, which he seized immediately. Anything was better than nothing. At precisely that moment the weight atop him was lifted, and he took the chance to squirm out from under the skeleton. It had managed to roll to one side and ease itself up with its remaining arm. Dismas didn’t think twice. With a madman's yell, he swung his new weapon at the monster's neck.

The blade of Reynauld's longsword still blazed with holy fire as it cleaved through the giant's collarbone and halfway into its chest. The armor parted like cloth before Dismas's desperate swing - more of a smite, now he thought about it. The empty holes of the skeleton's skull glowed blue from the flames that licked at the wound - flames that abruptly snuffed themselves out. The creature looked down at the blade in a movement approximating confusion.

The next moment it threw its head back in a silent scream. The fight came to a halt as the fire returned with a vengeance, pouring from mouth and eyes and from under the thing's armor. Flames like a vengeful sky devoured the profane thing bone and steel, bathing the tomb in the light of a savage dawn.

Dismas reeled, shielding his eyes more from the surprise than from the brightness. A cloud of green snuck into one side of the blue, and he peeked over his arm to see Badu standing up straight. A clutch of smaller skeletons charged her and one by one collapsed, poison gnawing at their fragile bones from another one of her bombs.

As the Light's rebuttal to the compelling argument of evil began to fade, the lifeless, kneeling cinder of the former foe swayed, tilted, and crashed to the floor with a metallic crunch. The tomb's defenders stopped where they were - a couple in mid-swing - and the battle froze in place like a demented wedding portrait.

Just as suddenly as their cursed champion fell, so too did its minions think better of continuing the fight. A chorus of clatters rose up as they cast down their weapons. As one they began to retreat, clambering over the balcony and rattling back the way they had come. They paid no mind to each other, to their brothers who crawled away with one leg or none, nor indeed to the living that moments ago they had been trying to add to their ranks.

A legless skeleton walking out of the room on its hands put an absurd signature to the fight's conclusion. The four were alone again, looking around at the battlefield and at each other as the unlikely fact of their survival settled over them.

Coughing from the room's center demanded attention. Reynauld braced himself against a corner of the sarcophagus, struggling to his feet. “Did we win?”

The question had seemed so out of their reach, so impossible before the onslaught of living death. None of them were quite sure what to do with the answer.

Dismas finally shrugged. “We're alive. I'll take it.”

Reynauld raised his visor with a scrape and a creak. His smile lit the room as the fire had done, a sunrise this time on the scattering of broken bones and ill-maintained weapons that remained of the undead ambush. “As shall we all! Victory!” Reynauld punched the air in triumph, then winced and grabbed at his side.

“How bad is it?” Dorothea flew to Reynauld's side, her hands aglow with that soothing green light from her battle with the giant.

“Nothing feels fatal, thank the Light,” Reynauld wheezed. “A couple ribs might need fixing...but the sacrifice is not in vain.”

As Dorothea stabilized Reynauld's wounds, Dismas's own caught up with him. Adrenaline had fulfilled its contract and slunk away with the enemy, leaving a shoulder, one thigh, and one hip complaining of mistreatment. Dismas was weighing the merits of a rest in that pitiful excuse for a tavern when something glinted from within the sarcophagus.

He found his dirk after a moment's search and approached the new hole in the box of dead man. He waved his dirk around inside; meeting no protest, he stuck a hand in and felt around. Metal.

When Dismas withdrew his hand, he found a little pile of coins glinting in the firelight. Gold they were, and stamped with the face of one of the kings of old Ronçevar. By the jingling noise Dismas's search had made, those kings had plenty of brothers.

“Break out the sacks, friends,” Dismas said. “That old coot wasn't kidding.” It was the first time he'd smiled in weeks.

\--

It had been almost too perfect. Once it had cooled down enough to walk in, Badu's charred hallway had ended up pointing them directly back toward the entrance. She'd even gotten a laugh out of suggesting she brew more holocaust oil for navigation.

Their first trip back up to the surface had found their horse as healthy as she could manage, blithely chewing on the straw left in the cart. As they loaded the haul from their third trip into the wagon, the horse's head hung in something resembling resignation. She was going to need that meal.

The ride back to the hamlet was as bumpy as before, though the discomfort was tempered by their victory. The wagon lay low down with a dozen sacks of gold, tapestries, and other artifacts plundered from the sarcophagus, adjoining rooms, and entrance hall. Reynauld lay in the wagon among the treasure and remaining supplies, peeled out of his armor for a change while Dorothea tended to his wounds. The jostle and shake of the road did him no favors, but as he kept insisting, his tour in far eastern Khosrau had been far more taxing.

Thus was it Dismas's turn to drive. He lounged up front with the reins in one hand, occasionally flicking them to keep the horse pulling them into the sunrise.

“Thank you.”

“Hmm?”

Badu had a remarkable knack for writing cleanly on this ill-kept road. She had been mostly silent over the course of the journey, sitting next to Dismas and scribbling in her journal as when they'd come the opposite way. “If not for you they'd be picking me clean down there. How many times did you save my life? Two? Three?”

Dismas smirked. “You're right welcome, Doctor. Saved your spooky hide as many times as you almost smoked one of ours.”

She punched him in the arm. “There's no reward without a degree of risk. A bandit like you knows that.”

“Aye. Though as risks go, it's hard to beat standing there waiting to get shanked.”

For the next minute, the only sound out of Badu was her breathing. Her quill quivered in her hand as Dismas's words festered between them.

“You disagree?”

Badu's response was measured, low, acid in her mouth. “You don't know the things I've seen, Dismas. You don't know what I saw when that thing splashed that...whatever it was.”

“Enlighten me.”

Badu did the opposite. “Ghosts. Someone...something I knew to be gone, dead and gone.” She pivoted then, the way she found she'd grown so damnably adept at doing. “You've seen your share, haven't you?”

Dismas breathed deep and swallowed, tamping down the heaviness in his chest. It never departed, but there were times when it waned, just to tease him. The feeling was throttling his soul now, its thick fingers interlaced deftly with Badu's.

“Your silence is deafening.”

“Reckon you'd better learn sign, then, because I've got enough for us both.”

“Keep it.” Dismas turned to look at Badu, one eyebrow raised in question. Her mask stared back at him. “You have your ghosts, and I have mine. Probably, so do they,” she said, pointing her quill back at Dorothea and Reynauld. “They're our burdens to bear. I don't ask you to help me bear mine. But you were there when I could not.” She flipped her book open again. “One day, perhaps, I hope to do the same for you.”

Dismas chewed on that for a moment. One good turn and all that. He couldn't recall anyone making that kind of promise to him. Among the brigands that infested the stricken moors and forbidding forests of d’Auseil, there was no such thing as a promise beyond a blade's edge or a gun's muzzle.

“You're assuming we both stick around,” he pointed out.

It was Badu's turn to shrug. “Where else am I to go? The University blacklisted me, and a plague doctor isn't exactly a welcome sight in a healthy village.”

“What about an unhealthy one?”

Badu's voice regained some of that mischief she'd found by blowing up a hallway. “I'm a scholar first,” she boasted, or perhaps admitted. “Someone like me _names_ diseases. Curing them is a luxury allowed by study and time...something the sick aren't always flush with.”

Dismas let a smile cross his face. “Well, next time I step out of the wrong brothel I'll be sure to send for you.”

Badu clapped her hands. “Oh! You'll appreciate this. They say that in the the Feather Cities there's this disease that actually causes your testicles to-”

“That was well done,” Reynauld interrupted.

“Eh?” Dismas responded, a little too enthusiastically.

Reynauld had propped himself up on one elbow. “Friend Dismas, you succeeded where I could not. You took up my sword and with one mighty blow smote the wicked giant where it stood.”

It had been kneeling, actually, and missing an arm besides. But Dismas knew there was no use trying to argue. It wasn't his vanity speaking, not that he had any. It was just the way Reynauld was.

“And you, Badu. Had you not destroyed the spider horde, we never would have made it past the entrance. Dorothea,” Reynauld continued, clasping the Vestal's hand in his, “yours is a virtue and courage rare even among my brother Crusaders. To risk one's life in the service of a friend...there can be no greater calling.” He coughed, squeezed his eyes shut against a stab of pain, and lay back down at Dorothea's urging.

The sun was high in the sky when they passed the first hovel on the Old Road. Outside of a ramshackle pile of planks and straw, an old man dressed in shades of dirt knelt among his herb garden. He looked up at the wagon as the heroes returned. Dismas nodded as the man stood and gaped at them. Apparently the locals weren't used to anyone returning, once they'd left.

The hamlet was a bustle of activity compared to when they'd set out the previous day. As Dismas brought the wagon into the town center he took a good look around in a way he hadn't bothered to when he'd arrived.

There was the Hello Stranger, its broken sign a polite suggestion to stay thirsty. But it was surrounded by other carts this time, carts laden with boxes and men unloading boxes at the direction of the mustachioed tavernkeep. A couple of burly fellows rolled barrels into the tavern, which Dismas hoped augured well for the quality of ale.

On a set of stone stairs beyond the Hello Stranger stood a well-dressed man in a red-and-gold overcoat, gesturing at a boarded-up building. He spoke to a nodding, twitching man Dismas recognized as the caretaker, who even from behind looked as obsequious and unhinged as ever. There were more buildings of stone, wood, and wattle and daub sprinkled around the town's central square, which bustled quietly with wary-eyed townsfolk and had a cracked, dry fountain as its centerpiece. A column of scaffolding rose from the fountain's center, surrounding a mostly complete statue of an old man Dismas couldn't identify.

He brought the cart to a halt at the bottom of the stairs where the caretaker and the mystery man were talking. “Old-timer!” he called. “We made it.”

The caretaker swiveled his head almost all the way around. When he saw Dismas and company he nearly fell over backwards with joy. “By the Light, can it be true? Are my eyes failing me? Oh, Dishwater, Roland, it's you! Diahan, Bertha, welcome home! Heavens above, you've done it!”

Dismas hopped down from the wagon and stiffened as the old man embraced him, holding his breath against an almighty stench of drink and other things he thought he'd better ignore. As the caretaker mercifully released his grip, the better-dressed man descended the stairs, clapping quietly.

“Dismas, is it? The highwayman?” The man was about Dismas's height; not old, perhaps thirty, but his thick brown hair was streaked with early fingers of gray. With his angular, well-maintained features and the jewels on six of his fingers, he looked like someone Dismas might have been happy to rob; the embroidery on his coat of gold and red made him look rather like one of the richer stagecoaches Dismas had in fact waved down and looted.

There was something odd about the way he said “highwayman,” as well. Dismas realized he hadn't spat the word in his poor, thieving face. It was like the rich man had asked a question, had expressed curiosity, instead of registering shock that he shared the world with those less fortunate than he.

The crest on the left breast of the gentleman's coat matched the one on the boxes. “You must be Lord Veruna,” Dismas guessed.

“Count Jehan Combeferre Victoire d'Auseil Veruna. At your service,” the gentleman said, bowing low.

That was new as well. Dismas wasn't used to having men bow before him, least of all noble men. He nodded, unsure how to receive this courtesy. “We got your stuff,” Dismas said with rather less ceremony. “It's down there with-”

“A Crusader! Sir Reynauld, then. Badu, the Plague Doctor...and that Vestal must be Dorothea.” The others acknowledged Veruna as they were named; Badu waved, Dorothea nodded, and Reynauld saluted. Veruna smiled, though the expression did not quite reach his tired green eyes. “There are not words enough to express my thanks. I've had a merry time finding anyone who would listen, let alone assist me. You've doubtless heard the rumors about my family.”

“Necromancer, was he? The last guy?”

If he was offended, Veruna was doing an extraordinary job of hiding it. The smile remained, though the lord inclined his head apologetically. “Among other things. I will be frank, Dismas...the land suffered greatly under my ancestor's rule. It still does. There will be time enough to explain, but for now I must attend to the renovations and the new arrivals.” He gestured to the Hello Stranger. “You and your party are welcome to rest and recover. It's the least I can do for my family's first friends in ages.”

Dismas nodded. “Appreciate it. And the treasure?”

Veruna chuckled. “Yes, yes. Once Monsieur Perrault is finished cataloguing it, eighty percent is to be divided evenly amongst yourselves. Consider the rest an investment for your lodging here.”

Perrault. So the caretaker did have a name. “Mighty generous of you, milord. You're a different sort of man than the usual noble.”

“Be it ever so,” Veruna said. “However you intended that, Dismas, I consider it a compliment. The rot ran deep in the circles where my great-great-uncle moved.”

“Rot, rot, like it or not!” Perrault laughed, in a joke only he seemed to get. “But now that you've dispatched that mad prophet holed up down in the ruins, the rot's pruned back a touch, no?”

Veruna paled. A cold wind picked up. Somewhere, a wolf howled. Dismas did not know whether to feel afraid or exhausted. “What fucking mad prophet?”

\--

Across the accursed moors and forests of the county of d'Auseil, far below the entrance hall of the old ruins, in a dingy, open cell lit dully through a rusting grate, an ancient man slumped against the chilly, damp wall. His beard was in tangles and stuck more than hung all the way down his front, white hair stained brown against sickly gray skin. Chains wrapped his sunken chest and filth-spattered legs and clinked as he breathed. His neck and his left hand were trapped in a great mass of wood that looked like it had been ripped from a pillory.

His free right hand bounced up and down in his lap, juggling two petrified husks almost unrecognizable as eyes. A bloody cloth wrapped his head where they should have been.

He perked up, jingling his chains as he moved. Something was coming. The rattle of bone on stone rumbled down the corridor beyond his cell. Skeletons, clearly, retreating from high above. Back to the vaults, back to their master, back from some battle.

It had been some time since one of those had happened.

From somewhere deep within the ruin of a man, a hacking, coughing sound clawed its way up his dry throat. The human wreckage braced himself against the wall and slowly, achingly rose with a chorus of scrape, crack, and clank, whispering a rhyme between peals of diseased laughter.

“Lefty, Lefty, what do you see?

'A bevy of corpses, running past me!’

Righty, Righty, why do they run?

'Foolish explorers, having their fun!’

Lefty, Lefty, will they be back?

‘With killers and thieves for to mount an attack!’

Righty, Righty, will they succeed?

‘They'll come and they'll go, and they'll drown in their greed!’

Lefty, Righty, what do you think?

‘Laugh yourself thirsty, there's blood yet to drink!’”


	6. The Sinners

Wednesday morning blessed the hamlet with a dazzling, cloudless sky, a blue canvas for the natural artistry of autumn leaves. The trees had faded to warm colors suggesting a bumper crop, harvest festivals, mountains of barley and wheat to be eaten and drunk as bread or ale. It was market day in the village, and the square thronged with farmers and artisans plying their trade.

Into this press of commerce and friendship strolled Dismas, whistling a jaunty tune and tossing a gold coin in the air. As he passed the town’s fountain, he flipped the coin into the water with a plunk, there to join its family. The fountain bore the beaming visage of Lord Veruna and sprayed crystal clear water, clean and sweet enough to drink. It warmed his heart to think of the charitable work the local abbey would put the fountain’s wishing coins toward. Wasn’t that what he’d wished on the coin for, anyway?

He stripped off his brand-new leather overcoat. The weather really hadn’t cooled enough for it. He could hardly wait for it; the fur-lined collar looked and felt mighty fine. Sable, it was - Byakhishevi sable from far to the north. But as he rolled up his shirtsleeves and nodded to friends and neighbors, he decided that warm autumn days were meant to be savored.

Just like the steaming stew that awaited him at the Hello Stranger, he thought. Dismas’s mouth watered as he remembered the hunting party from last week. They’d brought in the healthiest deer he’d ever seen, and the venison promised to be spiced to perfection.

“Dismas! The stagecoach is here!”

A smile burst across Dismas’s face. He had cleaned up specifically for this arrival. Bright-eyed and freshly shaved, he straightened his immaculate white neckerchief and ran a hand through his hair as he sauntered over to where Reynauld called him.

Two black horses drew a great oak stagecoach from the Old Road into the square. The driver waved to Dismas as he tugged on the reins, bringing the whole affair to a gentle halt. Word had spread as it tended to in small towns, and everyone in the hamlet and the outlying farms seemed to have turned out to witness this long-awaited reunion.

Reynauld walked up to the coach and stood to one side of the door as it settled to a stop. His armor reflected the crowd around him, sparkled in the light of the morning sun, no worse for the years of war in the East. With an exaggerated bow, the Crusader slid back the lock on the door and pulled it open for Dismas to greet his friends. As Dismas straightened his neckerchief, the thought occurred to him that he could not quite recall who he had expected to see that morning.

The bodies in the coach were familiar to him even so.

There lay the woman. Her head lay back upon the seat, lips frozen in an expression of vague surprise. Blood had dried brown in a shapeless splatter on the wood panels behind her and in a streak across her chin, where it had dripped down to add to the ruin of her chest. Sallowing skin tangled with yellowing fabric where the ball had struck her, drawn back from an ever-widening wound by time and flies.

Upon the surface of his blade she had been nearly whole. Here where she had ended, the truth of her fate remained: dead without knowing why, one hand clutching a bloodstained locket on the empty seat beside her.

Her other arm still cradled the boy’s head tight against her shoulder. A last act of love offered unintended mercy to those who now observed her, for the stain on her sleeve hinted at the child’s death-wound hidden behind it.

So transfixed was Dismas that he barely noticed the spreading wetness on his chest. The white neckerchief crept crimson into his peripheral vision. His knees shook but did not fail him; his urge to run the other way crumpled before the horror that raked at his soul and shackled its ragged edges to the scene of his damnation.

The world around him had long since fallen away. Pinioned there where he deserved to rot standing, Dismas could only drown in the sight of the victims, in the sound of their necks damply resisting movement as they turned to stare at their killer from eyeless faces.

By the Light, the boy barely had one left to speak of.

Leather sighed as a mailed hand clasped Dismas’s shoulder.

“Yours only?” rasped a hideous, grinding mockery of a familiar voice.

At the corner of his vision, at the edge of his sanity, Dismas saw Reynauld’s mouth open wider than he knew was possible. It was teeth all the way down.

\--

The more he struggled, the tighter the blanket seemed to tangle around him. Dismas thrashed and cursed as he dug himself out of sleep, as much to free himself from the patchwork sheet as from the grasping hands of the dead. A toss too far sent him rolling, falling, crashing to the planks of the tavern’s floor. The impact jarred him fully awake and somehow free of the blankets. He threw himself onto his knees and pivoted to one foot, fists raised.

No one. The room was dark and waxing dim, lit only by the weak morning light creeping through the shuttered window. Dismas’s battered overcoat and dull red neckerchief lay over the back of a chair next to that; his pistol and his dirk hung in their holsters from either side of its back. He was alone in the room, shirtless and boxing with shadows. The way he was breathing, he felt like he’d been in a fistfight with a hundred devils.

He happened to glance in the mirror hung crooked on the wall over the washing bowl in the corner. He’d yet to shave since he arrived. His hair was wild and matted with sweat. The scar drawn crookedly up his left side shifted with the rhythm of his panting. His eyes darted around the room, searching it for blind terrors from the depths of his guilt. Finding none, he stared himself in the face, tacking his sense of reality back to the room he’d fallen asleep in. Then the building. Then the town.

This fucking town.

\--

“Ho, bandit!” The tavernkeep waved at him from beneath an armful of chairs, smiling as if he hadn’t almost poisoned Dismas scant days earlier. A sudden infusion of capital could do that to a man.

Dismas descended the stairs slowly, one hand gripping the rail like it would rear up and bite him. He threw a nod the man’s way and crossed the dining area to the swinging doors.

The place had been spruced up significantly since last he’d tried to drink here. Planks from the old tables crackled away in the fireplace, serving a better purpose now that they’d been replaced with more stable furniture. Some grubbily dressed men were sanding down the bar with rough handfuls of horsetails. An old woman shooed a chicken clucking past Dismas and out the doors, giving chase with a broom conspicuously new for its recovering surroundings.

It was a relief to see the place coming to life, if only for the distant promise of a bed stuffed with feathers instead of straw.

He followed the chicken and its pursuer out into a gray morning that bore little resemblance to the journey to the ruins. The only townspeople out in the chill were a hard-faced mother hauling a bucket of water and a couple of farmers pulling at an emaciated cow. Scaffolding and boarded-over holes dotted the buildings like pox; long-delayed repairs that in the meantime served to block only most of the wind. There stood the fountain at the center of it all: a misshapen, half-realized carving, damply trellised and bearing the hint of an eventual glare.

Dismas shook his head. The dream was already fading, but the faces in it lurked in his memory like pools of quicksand. His ears perked up then at the sound of voices, muffled by the wet, somewhere across from him. He stood there a moment longer, waiting. There really was no hurry, if Veruna was as busy as he claimed.

The voices spoke as one - no, sang, Dismas realized - in some language he could only assume you had to be a godbotherer to know. The twin files of plain-robed figures approaching from the direction of the Old Road did nothing to refute his assumption. A priest led the procession, swinging a censer in one hand and intoning some holy verse from a book he held in the other. A circle at the center of a broken cross decorated the cover of his book, the rosaries at his hip, the sweetly smoking censer, and the very tall, gold-on-white standard some poor bastard at the back of the line had gotten stuck holding.

Reynauld’s people, there was no doubt, though none of them looked like facing down a horde of Easterners. The friars ranged in age from barely into their first beard to having given up shaving their last. Indeed, the leader’s seemed to have migrated down to his chin from his balding head.

The priest raised his voice then, singing a line that was repeated by the dozen or so behind him. Though the Church frowned on magic as its flock understood it, they seemed to glory in mysticism and ritual of their own design, and for Dismas’s money he couldn’t tell the difference - especially when people like Dorothea waved glowing weapons around, zapping the enemies of the Light.

Dismas looked again. That unlucky soul at the end of the line _was_ Dorothea. The standard she held aloft had to be thrice as tall as she, a veritable monument of wood and cloth.

Dismas waited in vain for the standard to tip and crush a line of friars when the wind picked up. Yet Dorothea held firm. The standard remained, billowing in the breeze like a ship's sail, its mast held perfectly straight against the weather.

For a woman, she must have had arms like boulders.

“Inspiring, no?”

It was at once surprise and progress for Dismas that he didn't immediately draw his blade. “I wouldn't know.” He nodded to the count, who had appeared next to him as if shaped from the gathering fog. “You invite them?”

Lord Veruna drew a thick bearskin around his shoulders and smiled, once again keeping his eyes out of it. “They're from Montreuil, about four days’ ride from here. I wrote the Bishop every day for three months before he would answer.”

“What changed?”

Veruna examined the blood-colored stone on his middle finger. “Oh, I told him that once the trouble was over, d'Auseil was his.”

The idea was so foreign to Dismas that he had to laugh. “You noble types just throw land around like that?”

"History of the world,” Veruna said dryly. “I made the same promise to my liege the Duke of Beruin.”

"Won't he be surprised.”

Veruna cocked his head and adopted a mock pensive expression. “As well as the neighboring Count of Saullons, the Marchioness of the Hepharne, the Doge of Zangaratti...” he said, counting on his fingers. “Who else? Ah! The War-Chief of the Boudiccaeans...”

He pretended to notice the bewildered glower on Dismas's face. “Oh, what? The Nine Hundred Hills are deceptively civilized.”

“And you intend to keep your promises how?”

“Well, obviously a condition of the agreement was absolute secrecy-”

“I don't give a shit about the land.” Dismas turned from the procession as it began to pass them. His hand hadn't yet found its way to the dirk thrust through his belt, but the way it rested on his hip kept his coat from hiding the weapon. “My concern is the problem you don't expect to solve.”

For a man of privilege facing a bandit and more than occasional murderer, Veruna's composure was indefatigable. “Not in the immediate future, I don’t.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Money, I’d wager.”

“Money I can get.”

“Not my money.”

“Your money’s at the bottom of a fucking hole!” Dismas hissed. “Filled with skeletons! Gods only know what else.” He had advanced on Veruna and was face to face with him now; he was not much taller than the count, but men who knew their way around death had a way of looming.

Veruna’s face was flat. He’d discarded his good humor as easily as a paper mask. “My thoughts precisely,” he whispered, just loud enough for Dismas to hear. He never once broke eye contact, and Dismas wondered at this time if he’d seen him blink yet. “Let me be perfectly clear, highwayman. Those churchmen are there to reconsecrate the abbey. It’s for the peace of mind of my guests, and you can take it or leave it. But I do not labor under the impression that what we face cares a whit for peace of mind.”

It was Veruna’s turn to loom. “My ancestor dug deep beneath the family manor for secrets too terrible for normal men,” he began, speaking low and quick. “One such man now lives in the ruins I sent you to raid. Once he prophesied doom and devilry should the work continue. My ancestor had him murdered. For peace of mind.”

“The hell does that-”

“The man came back.”

Dismas opened his mouth, but found he did not have an answer for that.

"Again and again my ancestor had him killed and again and again he returned. At long last my ancestor took him into the manor and showed him his progress. He gouged out his own eyes and ran gibbering into the night. If death could not deter him, _what did_?”

Without realizing it, Dismas had backed up against a stone retaining wall opposite the tavern. Veruna was a slight man, unarmed, bundled against the dismal weather, yet possessed of an unknown energy that pressed him toward a man who’d killed for convenience.

“The skeletons you fought in the ruins? Your brigand friends who prowl the forests with stolen artillery? They’re _worms_ compared to the things my people have seen. Masses of dead swine-flesh, sewn together and given life. Fish that walk like men and wield men’s weapons. Were you ever told not to wander in the woods, lest a witch snatch you up and boil you alive?”

The question blindsided Dismas, who could only nod his head.

“She was a dinner guest at my ancestor’s home. _Weekly_!”

Veruna had planted one hand on the wall next to Dismas’s head. The slick stone seemed to bring him back down to earth. Far from the mania that had taken him from one side of the path to another, Veruna suddenly seemed exhausted. The resolution in his eyes had melted into despair and threatened to spill in tears down his face, which this close Dismas could see was prematurely lined.

Twenty seconds dragged themselves by as Veruna caught his breath. He dropped his hand down by his side and cracked its knuckles in quick succession, staring at the ground as he did so. When finally he met Dismas’s eyes again, a thin smile had returned.

“It does not take a rare sort of person to stare death in the face. Only one with nothing left to lose. The world's full of those, Dismas. I need every one I can find.”

The fog-wet wall was soaking into Dismas’s coat now. He let himself relax into it. “Takes one to know one.”

Veruna laughed a little too loudly. “I knew I liked you, Dismas. What was it Rebice wrote? ‘Admiration is our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.’” For a moment he watched the priests, the friar, and the Vestal file through the abbey’s entrance beyond Dismas, the boards pulled aside to make room for the doors that would replace them. He returned his gaze again to the highwayman. “You and I are pragmatic sorts.”

“Meaning?”

“We base our decisions on practical rather than theoretical-”

“I know what the damn word means.”

“Of course.” Veruna meant that. “The land is dying, Dismas. My ancestor’s work drove away all but the most desperate, destitute, and despicable. You’re a brigand. You’ve seen it. It’s the poor preying on the poor, fighting for the scraps of my county.” He clasped his hands together, all façade and theater once more. “My name may be mud, but my title is a rock. The laws of the land are built upon it. By those laws it remains within my power to pardon you for all crimes committed within my demesne.”

The offer hung between them, and Dismas chewed on it like a cow on her thrice-eaten grass. Did he deserve it? Hell no. Did he need it? That was less clear. “What if I refuse?” he ventured.

For the first time, Veruna’s eyes glinted with some of the mischief in his smile. It was enough to make Dismas believe that the count had once been capable of doing so without preamble or agenda. “Then I expect you’ll get hungry and cold and go where the money is. That place may be ruled by a count that is much less friendly than I am...and much more a patron of the gallows.” Veruna spread his arms. “Leave, and run from your sins, and pray they do not catch up with you. Or stay, and battle the sins of my ancestor, lest they catch up with us all.”

“You think I can beat whatever it is he found.”

“I _hope_ you can.” Veruna’s smile faded. “Misery loves company. Some days I feel I’m trying to snuff a fire with enough moths. But there will be more fire, and more moths. My home is rock bottom for those who seek to rise above it. Anyone can break, Dismas. It's the putting together that's difficult. Who can say who they'll be should they succeed?”

Dismas wasn’t sure he liked being called a moth. But if the dream had meant anything, it was that there were some things he couldn’t outrun. “Fine. You’ve got a moth. But it’s one hell of a desperate man comes to a guy like me for help.”

“Oh, you should see some of the others.” Veruna laughed out loud. “Yet you were a brigand in these parts, and you were not among those who my ancestor set upon the people when they became rebellious. Reynauld told me,” he said, before Dismas could ask how he knew. “He thinks very highly of you, you know. He knows you do not revel in blood and terror, useful tools as they may be.”

All well and good, Dismas thought. But you didn't have to be evil to be bad.

As they finished speaking and he left the lord behind, Dismas wondered if the reverse was not also true.

\--

The standard of the Church had remained pure despite the filth of the surrounding countryside. Its embroidered circle-cross shimmered gold on its white field, radiating its own light in the sheltered alcove overlooking the high altar. The presence of that ancient symbol of the Light, blessed by its servants, kept the priest and the dozen friars warm even in the disused nave, whose vaulted roof leaked and whose windows had not known glass for years.

Dorothea had carried the standard from the meeting-place outside of town since matins, the liturgical hour before dawn. Now she had placed it where it would stand forevermore, a comfort to those who sought the protection of the Light and a terror to those who forsook it. She turned from the standard as the priest brought the dedication to a close. From a brazier shielded from the elements, the Vestal lit a candle the size of her forearm and set it upon the altar before her. By the grace of the Light, it would burn until the following morning, against all weather and trouble.

It was but one of the labors she had resolved to undertake to cleanse her soul. The sins that had driven her from Vandrelles would follow her through the rest of her faith journey; perhaps beyond, if necessary. Purgatory would simply be one more step on the path to the Light's grace. Some paths were longer than others.

Hers now took her down the center aisle of the nave, past the mostly-empty pews that had not been hacked apart for firewood during the previous winter. The eyes of the Church were upon her, and below that the eyes of her brothers in the faith.

She kept her head high and her steps slow. There was to be no rushing through the ceremony, nor any perversion of its carrying out. Her robes were thick and her body bound below them. Every movement was controlled, deliberate, for the slightest sway of the hips or tilt of the head threatened temptation upon those around her.

There were sisters in the faith here in town as well, but they were forbidden from this particular ritual. The dilapidated sanitarium next door was their priority, and they would be occupied for some time directing reconstruction efforts and the gathering of reagents to bring medicine to this forgotten corner of a moribund empire.

Even had the nuns been present and not the friars, a sinner of Dorothea's caliber would have been charged to behave in the same way.

As she turned and made her way into a lonely corridor, she noted an inward sigh of relief as she passed from everyone's sight. She did not chastise herself in the moment; she allowed the sentiment to flicker and fade. To actively tamp down such intrusions was to engage with them, tantamount to entertaining them. She had rather to resist acting on such thoughts, to instead file them away to be dealt with at a later opportunity.

Such an opportunity lay beyond a battered iron door set into the right side of the corridor. There were others like it, though they had not yet been made ready.

The room was bare save for an altar opposite the door, carved from the stone in the shape of an angel with her eyes downcast. A leather scourge hung in the angel's granite grip, the steel teeth set into its ends almost scraping the floor.

Dorothea knelt among the stains that painted the gray stone in dry, haphazard strokes of brown and red. She undid the clasps on her robes and hung them over the angel's arm. Though she removed the bindings upon her torso, she left her hair tied up.

The scars across her bare back formed a relief map of her journey to redemption. Long hair tangled in the wounds would have risked infection and undue suffering.

Dorothea removed the scourge from the angel's hand and bowed her head. Her travels had been long and sin ever flanked her narrow path from one penance hall to the next.

She thought of Badu, whose science had helped to strike down the colossus that had almost killed her. When her faith in the divine could not sustain her, she had fallen upon the mercy of a faithless human.

 _Swack_.

The teeth of the scourge bit into her penitent flesh, the leather strips at their heels. She clenched her jaw against the sting and whispered a prayer. When she had finished, she pulled the tool from her back with a wet scrape.

Yet had she not stood between Reynauld and his would-be killer? Had she not bent her life to the protection of a holy warrior, when he could not act in defense of the faith?

These, like many questions she posed to herself, were rhetorical. Exercises in temptation in an environment where it could be swiftly purged.

She struck herself again. Evil was pervasive, insidious, changeable. One could perform good works and yet be an instrument of the darkness.


	7. The Newcomers

_ Day of Saint Celeste (30 Brumaire), 1566 _

_ Third day here in the old sanitarium. I can sit up unaided for several minutes at a time, and the sisters here have been nothing but attentive and professional. True credits to the Light we serve! I should be on my feet before the week is out, if somewhat stiff. I walked off worse after the Battle of Esrioch, of course...but these are professionals. Looking forward to the pleasure of Dismas’s visit; Badu committed to study of the medical texts; Dorothea occupied with consecration and penance rituals. The gang are a dutiful bunch, to be sure, and if half of what I’ve heard about the new arrivals is true, there is naught in store for us but glory! _

Though Reynauld’s core was a field of bruises, strict bed rest and the nuns’ medicine and healing prayers had fixed the worst of his injuries. He lay shielded by a curtain, stripped to his bandaged waist and chronicling the week’s events in his journal.

Construction had progressed apace on the old sanitarium where he recovered. Atop the hill near the Hello Stranger the echoes of hammer and saw escaped through boarded holes in the ceiling and curtained holes in the walls, inviting the damp breeze in to replace them. Torches and candles burned on walls and in stands around the floor, protected from the weather and providing just enough light to work by. The crowded, leaking building was hardly a sterile environment for those in need of medical attention. But until the work was done, it was the best they'd get in this pit.

Not that Reynauld minded the chill. The desert nights had been deceptively cold in the East, and it was easy to imagine the curtain around his bed as just another tent; the sanitarium, just another ancient fortress appropriated for a new war. This time, he had the luxury of sleeping when it pleased him, rather than at the mercy of the heathen.

He yawned and stretched, wincing only a little at the dull ache in his side. It had faded, would fade further. His journal he tucked beneath his pillow before resting his head upon that blessed bag of feathers. If he settled into his pillow and turned his head just so, perhaps he could-

Wooden rings clicked and slid along a curtain rod. An intruder jerked the yellowed curtain rustling aside.

“Sir Reynauld, it's time for your bandages to come off.” A sour-faced nun stood beside his bed with a pair of scissors bordering on shears.

Inwardly he sighed. “Light preserve you, Sister.”

When the nun had finished and put back the curtain, Reynauld gingerly ran two fingers across the ribs she had helped to heal. The area looked ugly and felt uglier, deep purple marks that groaned at his touch and attested to his indomitability. Though the pain set his teeth grinding, he could not help a grin against it. This mark too would fade, or join the remaining scars written across his body by steel, fist, and flame. It was one less upon the body of an ally or an innocent. Permanent or no, an injury was a medal, a story grimly told of a fight valiantly fought.

Songs would be sung of the battle in the tomb, and faint strains of one were singing him to sleep now. Already he found himself drifting into a long-forgotten field of-

_ Click. Rustle.  _ “Still alive?”

“By the grace of the light!” Reynauld did not need to force a smile. Intrusive as it was upon his nap, he had genuinely looked forward to Dismas's visit. “How have you been keeping?”

Dismas cocked his head. “Better'n you, by the looks of it.”

“A handsome reward for a task well performed!” Reynauld kept a firm grip on his usual easy laughter; his ribs had a few handsome words to say about it. “You've decided to stay as well, then?”

“Might as well.” Dismas tugged his neckerchief down, scratching at stubble. “Veruna offered me a pardon. Figure it's this or more of the same.”

Reynauld smiled the way one might at a child tearfully admitting to eavesdropping. “I expected nothing less, my friend. A pardon is an admission of guilt, after all. It is a recognition of one's sins, and a vow to repent.”

“It's a ticket out of an execution,” Dismas muttered. “If I'm to die, I ain't much inclined to wait around for it.”

Such sentiment was common in the war camps of the Crusades. Reynauld had served with hard men of fierce deeds and bold words. What greater end than upon the sword of the adversary, in the service of the Light before which vice quailed and skulked? The Flame would test one's soul and burn away sin, if only one were to ask its forgiveness.

“Suppose you talked to our gracious host.”

“I did.”

“He tell you what else is going on?”

“He did.”

“Reckon this is suicide?”

“Quite the opposite!” Reynauld shook his head, that warm smile of his lingering in his pensive glance around the room. From where he lay he could see two nuns washing bandages in steaming tubs. Further beyond, in the driest corner she could find, Badu was leafing through a daunting tome that was probably medical in nature. The entrance was just visible; a woman had just walked in, clad in green pinstriped trousers and a leather jerkin the color of her dark skin. Her hair was drawn back in a bundle of tight braids, just above the crossbow slung from her shoulders. She slid past a pair of laborers,  approached a nun and spoke to her.

Dismas coughed. “Care to qualify that?”

“Oh! Oh, yes. Excuse me, I was lost in thought.” Reynauld looked Dismas in the eye again. Though his eyes still smiled, his face had gone serious. “Do you see my sword there, Dismas? Over on the table.”

Reynauld's longsword lay tied in its scabbard on the warped wooden table across from the bed. Of course Dismas could see it. “Looks like a sword."

“I meant what I said. We are sinners, you and I. No man is perfect, else what need for the Light to redeem the world he cares for?” Reynauld wove his fingers together and shrugged. “Now, you have not lived the life I have, striking down infidels in the Lands Most Holy. I have not lived yours.” Reynauld hardly needed to elaborate. “But again, I meant what I said. No man with evil in his heart could have wielded that sword and kept the Flame burning. You are doing great works here, Dismas. We both are. To heal the land...and to heal the soul. What could be less suicidal than that?”

“Killing something else?”

Both men turned to see the voice's owner, who spoke with a slightly nasal south-country accent. The dark woman had stopped near the foot of Reynauld's bed, a basket of herbs in one hand, a mortar and pestle in the other.

“She ain't wrong,” Dismas pointed out.

“The land's an open graveyard.” She was too busy glaring at Reynauld to pay attention to Dismas. “Better to send the monsters to hell than worry about getting yourself to heaven.”

Reynauld's smile lingered, though his brow furrowed in confusion. “To strike down evil is the duty of the Light, good miss. In all its forms, no matter how mean, its destruction is the calling of all men, faithful or no.”

The woman shouldered the basket, tossing the mortar and pestle in with a soft  _ crunch. _ “You who walks tall in the Light. Take care when you jump at the shadows,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Some of them are yours.” She threw her words into the rift between them and stalked off toward the door. Perrault chose that moment to stagger into the building, nearly falling over as the woman’s crossbow bumped him. He scanned the room, saw Reynauld, then grinned and started to make his way to him.

“Most distressing,” Reynauld mused, watching the woman leave. “Did I offend her?”

“Huh. To think you’re the married one.” Dismas wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. There was something to be said for Reynauld’s drive. It had certainly gotten them through the ruins alive. But someone as devout as Reynauld was bound to rub someone who wasn’t the wrong way. Right at this moment, he thought he’d pass on explaining that to his bedridden friend. It didn’t strike him as cruel - futile, rather, given the Crusader’s penchant for persistence. He felt worse for the stranger. “Anyway. Looks like you got a visitor.” Dismas hesitated, then moved to the side of the bed and clapped a hand on Reynauld’s shoulder. “Take it easy, metal man. Expect there’ll be another job for us when you’re out.”

He left before he could hear Reynauld’s response.

No sooner had Dismas departed than Perrault dragged himself wheezing to Reynauld’s side. “Good sir knight! My most humble apologies for disturbing you in your convalescence.” He seemed more stable than their first couple of meetings, though no less servile.

Reynauld smiled his most patient smile and waved his hand dismissively. “It’s a pleasure, Perrault. I’ve been eager to see you.” He waited only a moment before continuing. “Have you solved the mystery?”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course!” The old man dug around in his coat for several seconds, screwing up his face and mumbling in frustration. Finally he brightened and pulled out a familiar glass box. The three blue jewels sparkled again in the torchlight, all the more brilliant for their safety here in town. “Truly beautiful, these. Where did you say you found them?”

“Some ruins on a battlefield. They’ve been taking up space so long I must have gotten used to them.” The lie came easily to Reynauld, for nothing was a lie if one sincerely believed it. He  _ had  _ found them in ruins, after all, and there  _ had  _ been a battle there.

His conviction was certainly enough to convince the doddering caretaker. “Yes, yes, well. Intriguing as it is to hold a trinket from the East in my hands…well, that’s all it really is.”

“Is it?” Reynauld sat up a little straighter, holding his hand out as if his disbelief more than Perrault’s expertise qualified him to appraise his find.

The caretaker’s hand shook with age as he passed the box to Reynauld. “I went over it just the other night, after I’d finished tallying the haul from the old fort. They’re glass. Flawlessly made, but glass nonetheless.”

The box felt quite heavy in Reynauld’s hand as he took it back. It seemed to grow heavier on his lap as Perrault nattered on about old Ursule Veruna and how she’d been a great hand at marbles in her time, and wouldn’t it be lovely if her lost prize shooters were to turn up one day. Reynauld thought of the woman in the portrait in the cabinet where he’d found them. Expert appraiser the caretaker may have been, but Reynauld was tempted to leap from the bed and throttle the man, screaming in his face the connection he was failing to make.

It wore off as they said their goodbyes and Perrault went on his way. Crusaders possessed uncanny resistance to such temporal enticements.

As the curtain fell back into place, Reynauld found the solitude that had eluded him throughout the day. His armor and weapon - all the trappings of a man of the Light - lay hidden on the table beyond. It was just him and the box now. Veruna’s box, by rights. Reynauld’s, by accident.

Accident. It would have been a convenient fiction, had he been able to convince himself of it. Reynauld wallowed in his reproachful gaze, reflected from the glass lid of the box, from the marbles beneath. If they had just been glass, at least he would have had nothing to show for his weakness back in the ruins. Yet treasure they were, and rarer even than his greed had guessed. Priceless. Worthless. The lie and the truth both would damn him.

Try as he might, Reynauld had never been able to bring himself to truly hate the man in the reflection. To hate was to fear; to fear was to destroy. What warrior of the Light would remove himself from the battlefield?

What warrior of the Light would loot it?

These questions wrestled within Reynauld, carving a steep and slippery slope that bore him into the depths of doubt. In the sanitarium there was no enemy but himself, his body fettered by its injuries before a widening chasm of sin. As he struggled to climb out of it, he slipped into the sleep he had sought and been denied.

The dream was not the first of its kind. It came but irregularly, tending to bubble up from rare crises of conscience; all the worse, for Reynauld had learned to predict it by the common conditions of the moments before it seized him, though it was never quite the same.

This time around it was winter. The farm slept under a cold blanket of snow, a broken fence struggling to be seen above it. The house itself fared little better, buried almost up to the windowsill. The stone walls supported a roof of patchy straw and wooden beams swollen and warped from the elements and disuse.

From where he saw the house, he supposed he must be knee-deep in the snow, though he could not feel the cold and the wet as he should have. In the waking world he had only to recall the dry winters of the East to banish the discomfort of a chill. Within the dream the cold would flee - or the hot, or the wet, or the wind, however the scene presented itself. He was not there to complain about the weather; never would have thought to, when the sight of the open door, crooked and half-devoured by snowfall, made such a compelling demand on his attention.

Just beside it where the doorstep lay, Reynauld could make out a depression in the snow. The drift was not quite high enough to hide the pile of rags that lay still there, nor the snatches of pale blue skin among them. Long brown hair, frozen solid, almost blended with the wet cloth as the woman’s body knelt over another corpse. Reynauld could not see that second body, but he knew it was there.

It was almost a mercy that he was allowed to look down; his dream self did not always cooperate. He was shirtless as in the sanitarium, but lacked the scars and bruises of his campaigns, his skin warm and unspoiled by the freeze.

Injuries were disasters averted and lessons learned. Here in the prison of his conscience, Reynauld found himself maddeningly whole.

\--

Dismas realized he hadn’t yet eaten as he left the sanitarium. Though he was loath to return to the tavern he still didn’t trust, he’d gone hungry enough times in his life to swallow his dislike along with a bad meal. As he approached the entrance, he started at a tap on the shoulder. Damn it, couldn’t anyone announce themselves like civilized people?

“You’ve been to see him?” It was Badu, who pointed at the shrouded bed where the Crusader lay. “How is he?”

“Talking my ear off about the Light. Sounded fine to me.”

Badu drummed her fingers on the cover of her textbook. “Well, we’ve all got our distractions.”

“Whatever helps you sleep.”

“Or forget that we're puppets to a pulsing sack of meat and chemicals,” Badu said brightly. “I was just about to grab a bite at the tavern. Hungry?”

“Not anymore.”

The pair walked into the fog, a grounded cloud sparking with curses. Bundles of herbs lay scattered across the path scarcely two strides from the sanitarium door, the dark woman kneeling among them. Her basket sat next to her, speckled with dirt and mostly empty.

“Help you clean up?” Dismas offered.

The woman grunted approval, too preoccupied to look at him. “Damned fog needs to lift.”

“Sure, blame the fog.”

The new voice ground out the words in a leisurely rasp, muffled by the purple balaclava its owner wore under a glaring, spiked helmet. The man leaned against a tree, tossing a head of garlic up and down in one thick-gloved hand. His broad build, the rope coiled at his hip, and a vicious-looking axe strapped to his back all lent weight to his argument, if not credibility. He nodded to Dismas and Badu.

“I'm in a good mood,” the woman snarled. “I could have blamed the oaf who wasn't watching his step.”

From the deliberately languorous shrug that drew rattling laughter from the scales of his armor, Dismas inferred that the big man was enjoying this. “As you say. Fog needs lifting.” The brute straightened up and tossed the garlic expertly into the mortar where the woman had set it, dead center of the basket. “Be seeing you.” He sauntered off down the steps to some other errand, leaving the mess to the other three.

A retort sprung to the woman's lips and was bitten back just as quickly. She returned to gathering her herbs, aided now by Dismas and Badu.

The doctor held up a small brown package that had come open on one side to reveal brown clumps that were damp to touch. “Emperor Rohane root. Got the rot?”

A smile teased the corner of the other woman's lips, though she throttled it before it could blossom. “It works on fungus too. Same basic principle.”

Again Dismas paid little attention to the shop talk. He was more concerned with the shape of the armored man disappearing into the fog. Had he been at the tree when Dismas had entered the sanitarium? The sound of the clicking scales had long since faded. Either his senses were deteriorating with age - depressing, though plausible - or the man was especially nimble for being loaded down with arms and armor. Dismas thought of Reynauld, who valued protection over mobility in his heavy Crusader's plate. This seemed like a man who wasn't content to let a fight come to him.

Which perhaps explained the spilled basket.

Inside thirty seconds they'd recovered the herbs and reassembled the basket. The dark woman smiled with half her mouth and tapped her chest with one fist. “Sarai,” she said, for that was her name. “Appreciate your help.”

“You don't happen to know Reynauld, do you?” Dismas said.

Hardness returned to Sarai's face as she glowered back in the direction of the sanitarium. “I know his type,” she said. “Men who think they need a reason to slay the monsters under the bed.” She spat on the ground between her feet. “His good book is short on fact, long on metaphor. It's what any fool makes of it.”

“Even if he's a bastard,” Dismas quipped.

“Especially if he's a bastard.”

They had found common ground, but Dismas got the feeling it was on opposite sides of a very thick wall. He was thankful that Badu seemed to have appointed herself chief conversationalist. “What's the hunt?” she asked, craning her neck to look at Sarai's crossbow.

It was the right question, for she found another smile, this one known to her. “This here's Millicent. She's what you call an arbalest, and so am I. Veruna's woeful short on guards, so I reckon I'm the best he's got.”

That word “arbalest” was familiar to Dismas. It meant weapon and wielder both, usually in the service of a lord of some description. He crossed his arms. It had also meant a quick death for men in his line of work. And a weapon as tall as he was certainly merited a proper name. “Veruna tell you who else he's got?”

Sarai crossed her arms, tapping one elbow as she went down the list. “That Crusader and his pet Vestal, a plague doctor, a highwayman…” She looked Dismas up and down.

“Reformed highwayman,” Dismas said, as facetiously ingratiating as he could manage.

Sarai smirked. “He was mum on that. Let's see...we've met that blackguard of a bounty hunter, Toben,” she said. “He'd sooner burn a man alive than sit round a fire with him.” Sarai curled her lip, then smirked again. “And they say there's a delegation of Hellions bound for our humble home,” she whispered, one eyebrow cocked.

“Barbarians,” Badu breathed.

“Bah.” Sarai dismissed the idea with a wave of her free hand. “Veruna must be desperate if he's brought that lot into this.”

The notion was quickly making a skeptic of Dismas as well. “Those crazy bitches from the Nine Hundred Hills?” Maybe Veruna had been serious after all. “Thought they'd settled down or died.”

Badu wavered a hand up and down. “Most of them, after the old empire fell and the Great Heathen Army broke up. Some tribes stopped raiding and swore fealty to the dukes. The rest only have each other to pick on, mostly.” She stuffed her textbook in her bag and retrieved her notebook to leaf through. “It's been a while since my last history class…”

“Dregs. That's what's coming our way,” Sarai said. “No tribe spares their best warriors if their neighbors are sharpening their axes. They're certainly not fighting hard for a backwater county, far from the homelands and stuffed to the gills with monsters. Anyone coming here is a lone wolf trying to rebuild their reputation from the ashes of Veruna's.”

Once more she was not wrong, though acknowledging it was starting to get on Dismas's nerves. “Where's that leave you?” he asked pointedly.

“Dead,” Sarai said simply. “Orphaned. Friendless, with a crossbow for my companion, my sister...even my lover, if you believe the rumors.” She spat again. “Graveyard this place may be, but the gravekeeper's got money. Maybe a ladder to climb my way out.”

That was the hope. That was their common ground. As the three descended the stone steps to a meal at the tavern, a muted explosion echoed through the midday gloom. Dismas knew that sound all too well. The brigands were on the move again, them and their cannon. If the Hellions were coming, they'd have a right bloody welcome.

Anywhere sane, Dismas figured he and Sarai would be trying to kill each other, with Badu waiting in the wings to dissect the loser. If it was the end of the world here, perhaps it was the beginning of theirs.

If they didn't end up buried in it.


	8. The Hellions

There were no forests like this in the Nine Hundred Hills. The stories and songs of its tribes were written in blood and mead upon the wilderness from which they carved their kingdoms, a borderless sprawl of grass and scrub crowned by an immense sky.

The weald that strangled d'Auseil offered no such solace. Withered leaves clung to branches damp with lichen, jealously blocking the sun yet spurning the life it granted in favor of a choking travesty of vegetation. Flanked by the trunks of twisted black trees and carefully navigating beds of misshapen mushrooms and brown crabgrass, twelve Boudiccaean Iron-daughters marched through a gray-lit garden of rot far from the open embrace of home.

They walked in twin columns of five, with one leading solo and another in the rear. Redheads all, taller than the average civilized man, and clad in nothing they had not personally slain and skinned. Boudiccaean women never killed without taking a trophy, and these rattled with bones and teeth cut from a hundred beasts.

“Not far now.”

One of the column hacked and spat derisively. “Siobhan, that's the third time you've said that this morning.”

The leader, deeply callused and scarred for one barely into her twenties, glared back with her remaining eye. “Rignach, you've complained twice as often since we started. I've a mind to kick your head straight back to Scamall Dubh.” She shook a seven-foot glaive for emphasis. It rattled with a passel of wolves’ jawbones.

Nobody cracked a smile. The novelty had worn off for everyone else. Pride was Siobhan’s weakness. Great a hand as she was with a glaive, some cross words could punch her well above their weight.

More galling was the fact that Rignach had an excuse. Croaks, creaks, and the occasional blast of some spirits-forsaken machine dogged the Iron-daughters’ journey, a poor alternative to the bawdy, brutal songs they’d favored during the first few days of their long walk. Their quest had lurched into its third week by now. Three weeks of bad hunts, of freezing autumn rain, of gawking villagers come to look at the strange women from the untamed lands to the north.

Their great-grandparents had raged across this once-prosperous land, terrorizing sedentary, stupid lords and mocking their petty gods. This expedition was a slog through the corpse of an empire that laughed at them even in death. They could hear it in the whispers and jeers of peasants, in the wet snaps of branches underfoot, in the throaty cackle murmuring from the trees to their-

“ _ Ciúin _ !” Siobhan hissed, though none of them were speaking.

The Iron-daughters halted and formed a circle, a tight perimeter bristling with glaive, fur, and bone. None dared to speak, lest the faintest of sounds mask whatever dwelt in a place black below the noonday sun.

They breathed slow, quiet, knuckles white on glaive-shafts, fur wicking nervous sweat from battle-leathered skin. Whatever Siobhan had heard responded in kind to their vigilant silence.

If indeed she had heard anything.

A shot tore through the stagnant forest air, followed by the report of a branch cracking overhead. Siobhan moved not at all, gripping her glaive tighter and glaring into the black. As she looked left and right she could see movement around the group, figures slipping out from behind trees and advancing.

Siobhan's lip curled. Even the damp of the forest's decaying undergrowth could not hide the stench of these men. They were rank with blood and drink, like they hadn't come near a river in weeks, and the fact of it preceded them like a hail of arrows before a charge.

The men were big and ugly lumps of burlap and muscle, and Siobhan guessed the one who approached her to be the leader, him being the biggest and ugliest. He was two heads taller than she and possessed a leering face not flat but flattened, suggesting violence dealt against those who had endeavored to smooth it out. A nine-tailed whip hung lazily in one hand, and a pistol the size of Siobhan's forearm was stuffed in the brute's belt.

He talked down to Siobhan, grumbling out a deep, gravelly litany of what sounded like fighting words. Siobhan was not fluent in the languages of civilization - what her people called Stonespeak, after the castles the settled folk raised like square tumors on the earth - but curses and threats tended to be universal.

The group of rough-spun forest dwellers formed a vague half-circle around the Iron-daughters, outfitted and numbering no less than they. By the gleam of hunger and amusement in some of their eyes, Siobhan surmised that these men did not take her band for equals. If a body wanted a fight, words would only give an opponent time to prepare. That the men hadn't set upon the Iron-daughters immediately suggested that they thought to play with their food.

The men of the civilized lands had forgotten the ferocity of a woman sufficiently armed. Siobhan would have to remind them. Threatening the pistol and whip were alongside the sheer bulk of their wielder, but their import vanished with the man's nose when Siobhan swung her glaive and cleaved his face in two.

How a man's voice could change when struck hard enough. The towering brigand reeled, clutching at his split face and shrieking higher than any of the Iron-daughters reckoned they could manage. They answered him with a cry of their own and broke formation, charging the men as one.

The fight was short. One by one the Iron-daughters chose opponents, falling upon them like rocks jarred loose from a cliffside by lightning. Half were felled in an instant, their surprise rendering fatal single glaive-strokes. As Siobhan forced the stumbling giant to the ground, another shot rang out to her right. She saw Lasairfhíona scream and spin off her feet. A rain of red from her side marked her the unlucky victim of a lucky gunner.

Siobhan reversed her glaive and drove it into her prone opponent's heart with a growl. She hadn't time to waste on a fallen ally, not with an enemy to take out of the battle. Blood was blood and death death, and if you were caught flat-footed it was your own fault. Lasairfhíona's killer demonstrated as much, pausing to reload and getting his neck opened by Nuala for his trouble.

Corpses littered the forest floor inside thirty seconds, all but one of them belonging to the brigands. Some of the Iron-daughters had already relaxed out of their combat stances, bending to cut ears from the losers.

The two remaining brigands fought a sloppy retreat the way they had come. That they were dodging or blocking strikes from two Iron-daughters apiece was a testament to their stubbornness and little else. It was the hill-women who got to play with their food - Nuala and Medb, Aífe and Saoirse, chopping playfully at men who backed away and took it rather than turn and risk being cut down from behind. It was their turn to be jeered at in a language they could not understand. 

Medb soon tired of this and brought her blade down on her opponent's wrist. He did not cry out, to his credit, but stared at the spurting stump that was once his hand until his head left his shoulders.

The brigand's head bounced and rolled in the underbrush, almost drowning out a resurgent bout of cackling.

All came to a halt as the sound drifted into the battlefield. The final brigand froze, backed up against a tree by the Iron-daughters into whose hands he'd delivered his pitiful life. Aífe and Saoirse crossed their blades at his throat, earning the luxury to look at each other uncertainly. Siobhan herself looked up from kneeling on the huge corpse she'd made, one hand still pulling an ear taut.

A snort from behind Siobhan made her jump. It evolved into a snide chuckle and brought her steaming down to earth. “A little wind got you shaking, fearless leader?”

Siobhan whirled, seething she didn't care how openly with the remnants of her battle rage. It was Rignach, of course, whose streaks of blue war paint could never hide the blush stoked by a good mocking. The fire in her cheeks had a peculiar way of setting others’ blood boiling. “My hands are steady enough to sew your mouth shut, you-”

She'd barely started speaking when a thick, spiky vine reared up from behind Rignach and wrapped itself around her mouth, quick like a bowshot. Thorns raked at Rignach's cheeks, tearing the blush out of them and matting her furs with blood. She dropped her glaive and grabbed the vine, an instinct that proved ruinous to her hands.

Her sisters hammered shouts of alarm into battle yells as they leapt once more into action. Úna and Niamh seized Rignach by the arms, holding her in place as she thrashed and bled. Grainne chopped in the darkness behind Rignach, splitting the vine in two with a clean stroke. It flailed like a severed arm before falling free of Rignach's face.

The others clustered around her and dug through their packs for poultices and bandages. Siobhan nearly gagged as she looked between two dreadlocked heads and saw Rignach, moaning like a crippled horse through a permanent, ragged smile. The rent ruin of her mouth would never speak again.

A cough from nearby reminded the Iron-daughters that they had not finished their job. The last brigand had sunk to his hands and knees at the base of the tree. He was making no effort to rise as he shook his head.  “She's com-”

Whatever he had been saying, it was all the man had time for before a gaggle of vines burst up and wrapped around him, pulling him into the ground with a muffled squawk.

Something brushed against Siobhan's ankle at that moment. She looked down.

The end of the severed vine quivered weakly around her feet. There were other disturbances in the bed of fallen leaves and mushrooms, making the forest floor ripple with hidden, slithering enemies.

“ _ Thíos!” _

Siobhan's scream provided none of the intended warning. Vines bristling with hooked thorns burst from below and around the Boudiccaeans, shooting demonically skyward and lashing at the intruders with horrific, blind accuracy.

Nuala was seized around the arms and pulled into the leaves, buried by a cruel blanket of fanged foliage. Medb and Aífe yelped as their legs were jerked out from under them, falling into the churning, spiny pit the forest floor had become. Rignach dove for her glaive, rolled, cut two snaking vines before they could snatch it from her bloodied hands. She had time for a wet, defiant roar before a third vine dove into her shredded mouth, ripping at her throat from inside. Her jaw made an audible  _ crack  _ as she went limp.

A smaller vine tried that on Siobhan. She barely managed to dodge to the side and bite it in two. Thorns stuck in her teeth, filling her mouth with fire and fueling her fury at having been so disastrously surprised.

It was a trifling success. The vines wrapped around the party and each other, devouring the Iron-daughters quicker than they could resist. They were trapped in an enormous, serrated thicket that grew tighter and more tangled by the second. Siobhan's glaive was wrenched from her hand by the foul plants, and she bit through her lip as she felt her fingers break.

The cackling floated into the carnage again, weaving itself into the scrape of thorn and stem, into the crush of the vines around legs and ribs and heads. Siobhan watched her companions disappear under the abhorrent growth, heard their screams die below the rustle and snap of corrupted flora, struggled in vain against the revolt of nature herself.

Still the hideous laughter was shot through it all, hellishly certain proof that Siobhan's senses had not earlier deceived her.

They had failed her nonetheless. They mocked her now, inviting her to feel the sharp warmth of bone and fur pressed too tight into her back - one of her tribe, surely, bound there by the constricting vines. Siobhan's anger was extinguished, plunged into icy dread, as still-living Deirdre managed a whisper.

“Eilidh...that fucking coward, why…”

The vines were mounting to the trees, but Siobhan could still see straight ahead. She could barely make out two paths through the forest ahead. The cackling bubbled forth from the right. It came from a large, stooped figure that walked lazily toward the thicket, its silhouette bearing two malformed horns.

“Pointy little flies, aren't you, dearies? But you won't be cutting your way out of this web, no, no, no...” The voice was feminine, wrung high and grating from its throat like a cat ground between two millstones.

Tiny creepers probed at Siobhan’s eye as her gaze darted to the left path, as she watched her sister turn and run, the way she'd vowed never again to do.


	9. The Warriors

The roof was a damn sight more comfortable than those back in Douars. The shingles were cut from wood rather than the slate of the city; less durable in the recent bad weather; softened by moisture and moss. 

For Sarai, they were as good as spring grass. From her watch atop the abbey the hamlet lay before her, a muddy spill of timber and rock through whose streets the occasional peasant picked their furtive way. The fog had lifted since that dismal day she'd arrived, though the sun still sheltered behind an intermittent warning of cloud.

Iron the early afternoon sky, iron the sights mounted upon Millicent, iron Sarai's gaze as she lay on her stomach, peering over her crossbow upon the town below. She'd been up there since before dawn, in what she'd deemed the optimal post. From here she could see the town's three entrances, all the crumbling houses, the pitiful, waist-high palisade, the rotting skeleton of a rotting settlement. One path led west to a sheltered cove; one east, toward the part of the forest decent folk no longer dared enter; one north, to the Old Road and the ruins that d'Auseil had once rallied around for defense.

Sarai chewed slowly on a bit of redleaf. It would ruin her teeth one day, but the tang was pleasant and she found it helped to steady her hands. You couldn't pull a trigger with your teeth, anyway. She spat to one side, splattering spice and spit against a gargoyle who looked resigned to the indignity.

There was a perfectly good hole in the roof to rain her disdain on the friars below, but her father hadn't raised her to be petty.

Wind floated in from behind her, rippling the canvas covering the worst of the holes in the roofs. The sound reached her like laundry day back home, the whip of fabric making small talk with the creak and sigh of branch and leaf. Her spine prickled with the effort of maintaining her position. All morning the temptation to look behind her had camped at the back of her mind, for there was in fact a superior vantage point.

She'd seen it on the climb up to the abbey's roof. Count Veruna's ancestral manor perched like a raptor high on the hill overlooking the town, the one building here that none had attempted to repair. Rubble and splinter blighted towers and gables that yawned neglect from the holes in their limestone cadaver. Any other landmark would have faded into the background of the locals’ routine. Veruna's birthright refused to blend into its environs. The dead house simmered with a foreboding aura that captivated the onlooker as only the blackest of rumors could. Yet none dared discuss it, and fewer still looked long at it, especially in the middle of the day when the ruin would stretch its Cyclopean shadow down the hill to stain the homes of its sworn serfs as it had stained their lord's soul and his lands besides. The shadow chilled the heart with its daily advance and mocked the people with its daily retreat, a sated demon that winged its terrible way overhead and forced those below to guess at the speed of its waxing hunger.

Sarai loathed the abbey, loathed the cheap virtue of its religion, loathed the men below who whispered their sins into saintliness. She knew right from wrong and the range of her crossbow to enforce it. But she'd sooner bow and scrape before the broken cross below her than chance a visit to Veruna's. The lord himself kept his chambers in the top level of the town hall. If there was one skill common to nobility, it was an instinct for delegating, for letting others wander into danger and for picking up the pieces. Resentful Sarai might have been of the stations of the privileged and the greedy, but she trusted the experts when it came to avoiding danger.

She was ruminating again. She pushed it aside and focused on the forested horizon.

A crack drew her attention. Brigands, surely. They had the run of the local lanes, a claim written in black powder. Sarai had little love for these highwaymen and their guns - brutes with brutish tools that could kill in the hands of a frantic half-wit. There was no honor in a musket. Sarai's arms were wood from drawing and hefting her crossbow for a clean shot, her every bolt's destination secured by steady hands and steady eyes.

Those eyes now showed her a cluster of swaying brown leaves among the trees a few miles to the northeast, whence another shot now sounded. They were definitely rustling against the prevailing wind. That meant something within was disturbing them. Sarai's finger hovered nearer to the trigger lest some winged terror burst howling from the tree cover and take her by surprise.

The spate of unnatural movement and sound died after scarcely five minutes. After the five more that Sarai waited to relax, it was like those trees to the northeast had never deviated.

This self-appointed guard detail was again proving fruitless. Sarai knew that a town posted guards in the hope that their jobs would be uneventful. She hadn't expected the village to be this boring. The nameless hamlet barely muttered with activity; even the cows she could see in their tiny pens weren't heard to complain.

Smoke rose from the chimney of the smithy two buildings down, which Sarai guessed counted for something. The blacksmith hadn't had much business beyond fixing hoes and shovels since the trouble began. Now he had a captive, increasingly diverse clientele.

Monsters at the doorstep could do wonders for one's livelihood. Sarai was living proof.

So too was Toben, who slunk out of the smithy just as Sarai's gaze rested on it. He had at least a head and sixty pounds on her, but he moved with a calculated grace Sarai had once thought alien to men of his size. You had to see his footprints to believe he left any.

As if to acknowledge the compliment, Toben looked directly at her from across the square. He'd left his helmet in his room at the tavern, but the brick of stubbly gristle he called a face was no less menacing. Sarai could see a mote of hunger in his beady black eyes, in the bare of teeth that passed for a smile behind chapped, cut lips. She cursed her sharp vision and glared back.

They’d perfected this dance in the weeks they’d known each other; sometimes far, as now; sometimes close, as in the stagecoach from Douars. Toben always smiled enough for the two of them, which wasn't necessarily much. He was still smiling as he turned away and strode off toward the tavern where he was staying. With his back to her Sarai could see him scratching the back of his neck.

It was a deliberately flimsy excuse to run his fingers along the haft of a double-headed axe hung on his back. Looked new, or at least polished.

Sarai fired another spray of spit over the hole in the roof. Her aim, like her steady trigger finger, was always tightening with exercise. Not for the first time, she imagined what would happen if either one snapped.

Another breeze sighed down from the Veruna house. The wind was warm for this season, like the breath of a patient tiger.

\--

The tavern had a stout, new door, instead of the loose, creaky bastard that the wind had been blowing open lately. That was the first thing Dismas noticed. Last week’s caravan had brought in new fixtures and furniture - even a rug that looked like it might be from one of those Eastern places Reynauld was always banging on about. It really tied the room together, though it was unlikely to stay pretty for long. Nothing ever did here.

Even so, Dismas had to admit that the tavernkeep cleaned up nicely. The main hall was lit this evening by candles in sconces of iron and glass, instead of torches, and warmed by a healthy fire you could see through the windows now that the grime had been wiped way. Dismas didn't yet think it cozy, but it was a far cry from the dank dive he remembered from a couple of weeks ago. He hunched over his tankard and took a sip. Bitter, but wholly liquid. That too was a start.

The place still smelled burned but no longer held in the smoke from the fire. It breathed easier, and so did its patrons. Word must have spread about the remodeling, because the Hello Stranger was far better populated than it had lately been. Dismas had doubted there'd been a dozen people living in the town, yet there were at least that many drinking tonight. There were even a couple of barmaids on duty.

The tavern had the usual village coterie of four wrinkled old-timers clustered around a corner table, whiling away each night like it was their last and they'd decided it should be peaceful. Two middle-aged women whispered furtively at the bar, a half-finished scarf lying forgotten to one side. The townspeople seemed to prefer sticking in groups, as if watching for something that hunted them.

Dismas glanced from behind his drink over at a graybeard in an armchair near the fire, the only other person who was here alone. The man wasn't like the old townies in the corner; his age was carved upon his skin like notches on a longbow, not setting into him like the film on a neglected bucket of milk. A quill moved in his right hand as he scratched away in a battered leather book; in his left, he held a brass lorgnette to his frowning eyes.

One of Veruna's imports, surely. Literacy wasn't in high demand among the natives. Dismas himself didn't have much use or desire for it.

The highwayman set his drink next to his pistol, half-disassembled for the second time that day. The dream had come again, and as calming his nerves went, working with his hands was a damn sight more productive than drinking until he could no longer feel them. One and done tonight.

It had occurred to Dismas before that the weapon figured into his dream, but it was a familiar tool that had saved him before in the waking world. No sense tossing something out if it offered solace. That was why he'd bought the drink, come to think of it. He could already feel a comfortable buzz in his fingers, or imagined that it was coming. Calm nerves meant sharper focus.

So he managed to screw the hammer back into place without slipping, surprised as he was to receive a visitor.

“Room for one more?” Toben's voice didn't ring the way it had behind his helmet, and his face wasn’t half as well forged. He'd slipped silently up to Dismas's table and was already pulling a chair over. Dismas grunted his approval. A little company might keep his mind busy in case it wandered unpleasant places again.

“Ahhh. Much better.” Toben leaned forward, letting his crossed arms hang over the chair's back. “Shit roads this neck of the woods. That stagecoach plays hell with a man's spine.”

“Wagons too,” Dismas agreed. “Veruna tell you about the ride back from the ruins?”

“He did at that.” Toben cracked a smile, showing ranks of yellow teeth that in places had been promoted to gold. “‘Cept the way he told it, you had quite a bit of yellow, jingly company weighing your ride down. Heavy vehicles roll smoother, don’t you see.”

“If you’re willing to fight a skeleton or twelve to weigh one down.” Dismas appraised Toben from behind his tankard. The man must have been in a good mood, or simply smiled a lot. His mouth was a slash of yellow among the scars and pockmarks, making his face look like a wheat field almost leveled by war. The candlelight flickered in miniature in his black eyes, not that he needed the extra glint. Toben seemed willing to tolerate a degree of black magic for gold. Most men would.

Toben whistled. “So it’s true what they say in the city.”

“Might be. Haven’t been in one in a matter of months.”

“Word gets around. Even if you ignore the city, it don’t always ignore you. Cities are like that. Barmaids too, thank the Light. Ale.” He signaled to a passing girl for a drink and leered as she walked away to fetch it.

“You a city man then?”

“That's where the work is.”

“Bounty hunter, right?”

That drew a chuckle from Toben. “Sarai tell you that?”

“It wasn't true?”

“No, no, she's honest. Poor girl couldn't lie if her daddy beat her for saying the sky was blue.”

Dismas laughed out loud. “Makes you feel sorry for her. Honesty can get a man killed.”

“That it can.” Toben nodded at Dismas's gun. “If I might risk a little myself, it must take a lot of practice to tinker with that pistol. Especially with a drink in one hand.”

“Eh.” Dismas tapped his tankard. “Brew's weak.” He took another sip. “I knew a guy once - name of Moritz Half-hand. He used to be able to strip a gun blind drunk.”

“He get his name that way?”

“Nah. Stupid bastard got bit on the hand by a whore with bad teeth. Course he spent his last coin on her, so he ain't seeing a doctor. The bite festers. The pain gets to be so bad he drinks himself numb and tries to shoot his hand off, but he drops his pistol and gets distracted fixing it. Strange guy.” Dismas drained his ale and set it aside with a clunk. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

Toben snorted with laughter, and soon enough the conversation faded into companionable silence. Dismas gave his pistol one last once-over with the horsehair brush he kept in his tool pocket. Toben received his ale and took a sip. The bounty hunter licked his lips and cocked his head, then took out a little black journal and a crude pencil.

Dismas couldn't make head or tail of the lines in Toben's book. “What's that supposed to be?”

“Hobby of mine. Waste of time, really.” Toben slid the book over for Dismas to see, as if that would help. “This column here is where I drink. This other one's my opinion of the local ale. Helps me decide where to work.”

“Huh.” Dismas pretended to study the black scratches and symbols Toben called writing. Nonsense. “Seems a long walk for a short drink. Some ale's good, some bad, depending. That's life. But coin is coin.”

Toben shrugged. “Waste of time, like I said. But a man needs interests. Makes him interesting. And sometimes your interests lead you to interesting places. Take your whore with the rotten teeth, for instance.”

“What about her?” The aftertaste of Dismas's ale was creeping into the back of his mouth, the way whatever he'd eaten tended to when a conversation turned mysterious.

“What ended up happening to her?” Toben was grinning again - rather wider, Dismas thought, than when they'd touched on the subject of treasure. It unnerved him, and he briefly cast a glance to the side. The graybeard in front of the fire was stuffing a pocketwatch into his woolen vest and rising from his armchair.

“How am I supposed to know?” Dismas shoved his flintlock back in its holster. “That's Half-hand's business. He eventually got three fingers amputated and skipped town.”

“Quitter.” Toben took a gulp of his ale. “That's where the law comes in. Get a bounty on the bitch's head and a guy like me to solve the problem for you. They've all got public drunkenness charges. Just a matter of the right paperwork.”

“Ain't worth it,” Dismas scoffed. “You lose a fight to some whore, you deserve what you get. Guy like Moritz, odds are she ain't the one who started it anyway.”

“Ah, but it's the principle of the matter,” Toben countered with a wag of his finger. “Laws are funny things. They don't recognize getting even. Violence is violence, and Lady Justice is a blind cunt. And yet somehow it's safer if you put the sword in her hand.” He pulled a burlap bag from his belt and set it on the table with a rattling sound. “Anyone can kill an outlaw. That’s what makes ‘em outlaws. Sure, sometimes the bounty might be for a living target, but…” The bag shifted as Toben drew the strings open, inviting Dismas to look inside. “Well, life’s rough. Targets get violent.”

The ale in Dismas’s stomach frothed and threatened to boil back up his throat. Toben’s bag rattled softly as he held the neck of it open. It looked like there were countless little white stones inside, each flat on one face and all in a wild array of sizes. They were almost pretty the way they gleamed like pearls in the candlelight. Some of them still had the roots to give them away as teeth.

“This another one of your hobbies?” Dismas managed to swallow his bile and rise above a whisper.

“You might say that,” Toben said. He dug around in the bag with one gloved finger. “Trophies. Progress. Keeps me sane when work gets thin. They start to run together after the thirtieth or fortieth, but some you never forget. Take, for example, this molar right here...at the time, I think she was about-”

An almighty crash from the front of the tavern interrupted Toben’s story, followed by a series of thuds. Shouts went up and chairs tumbled as people leaped to their feet or fell from their perches. The candle flames hid in their sconces, brought low by a blast of wet wind through the broken window. Toben pulled his bag shut and returned it to his belt, watching curiously as Dismas lifted his head from the table where he’d ducked and covered. The highwayman’s hand shot to where he’d holstered his pistol as he rose from his chair and stalked over to see what the fuss was about.

Dismas shoved his way into the crowd that had gathered before the window, customers and barmaids alike muttering and staring at the disturbance. Amidst a tangle of iron and glass, the hard old man from the fireplace raised his head slowly and winced as he shook it. He braced himself against the floor with one elbow, raising his writing hand to pick glass from his white mustache and beard. Dismas hadn’t been able to see it from his angle before, but the old man wore a studded leather patch where his right eye must once have been.

He held out a hand to the stranger. “Where’s the fight?”

The man squinted, from disorientation or nearsightedness Dismas couldn’t tell, and slapped his hand into the highwayman’s with a grip that made his fingers complain. He was stronger than he looked, and this close Dismas could see the old-timer was nearly twice as broad as he, with bits of light plate just visible below the straining buttons of his vest.

“Much obliged, private. She’s outside.”

“She?” Surprise had a way of stubbornly clinging to men who should have outgrown it.

“With the red hair and furs. She’s obviously sound of body but her mind’s far from calm.” The old man pointed at the window, and the crowd parted for them all to see. Night had fallen once more, but the torchlight threw shadows that taunted curious onlookers with running figures and frantic voices. Dismas couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he thought one of them rang with an accent he’d never heard before.

“Gonna need a weapon.”

“No time. My arms are at the smith’s for repairs...”

The old man trailed off, though not with the absentmindedness of age. He was eyeing the front door of the tavern, assessing its thickness and bulk. It really was a fine thing, edged in wrought iron with a window set into its oak body.

“...But that door looks sturdy enough for a shield.”

As with taverns, so with men. Sometimes a look told you exactly what to expect. That was Toben, whose scars seemed more and more the footprints of a crippled soul. Yet there was always room for surprise. Dismas tried not to let it show on his face as the old man slid a metal gauntlet onto his right hand, punched through the little window, and lifted the door from its hinges over the tavernkeep’s protests. “Look lively, friend, and stay sharp,” the man said gruffly. “We’re on the move.”


	10. The Misunderstanding

The chill was moon-dried, a white smile ushering the air into the chinks in Reynauld’s armor, there to try the warmth of his tabard. How far the moon was from here, Reynauld thought, gazing up at it as he walked down the steps from the sanitarium, his sword finally returned to his hip. So far, and yet no less able to light the way when it wished to. It reminded him of the long march from Meuftrec, which the heathen had called Muftaraq - before it had been put to the torch, of course. The world had had yet to awake to the glory of their victory, and the light of those cleansing flames had guided Reynauld and his brethren all the way back to camp.

One gateway to Hell had been purified. Now Reynauld felt he stood upon another. But unlike Meuftrec, the people of d’Auseil did not grovel before false, half-beast prophets. This time it would be easier.

Yet here in the country of Reynauld’s birth, his dreams dogged him as they never had in the East. Why here, in a Light-fearing hamlet besieged by sin, and not there, in a land that had pledged itself to it, did his sleeping mind war with his waking heart?

Reynauld shook his head. A glance at the helmet he carried under his arm was enough to turn his perspective outward for now. Many a heathen had beheld its steel visage and taken the sight with them to the afterlife. So now did it put his apprehension to rest.

“I will forget them,” he whispered. “Regret is sin.” Those seven words he’d carved into his heart, perhaps deeper than any of the church’s catechisms, any verse in the Good Book.

Perhaps that in itself was some sort of transgression. What man did not have one or two of those lying around?

He squinted in the ruddy torchlight that illuminated the square. There were men shouting and running about down there, keeping a safe distance from the tallest woman Reynauld had ever seen. A high voice reached him then, shouting nonsense words into the evening; hers, most likely. The air thrummed with foreign babble and battle orders barked through the evening black.

Reynauld donned his helmet, rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and broke into a jog. Here was something he understood.

\--

It was the middle of autumn and the tavern door had been stolen. No place of business could be warm or welcoming without one, not in the middle of a wet autumn night. But the window had gone first, so as far as the old man was concerned the damage had already been done.

"I would know your name, private," he said, advancing carefully through the mud beyond the tavern threshold. "It is the greatest sorrow for a soldier to fall without one."

Dismas nearly did fall, slipping in the mud and just managing to keep his balance. For the second time in as many weeks, he thought of his flintlock safe in its holster and took pride in his trigger discipline. Better men than he had blown their brains out tripping with gun in hand. "Dismas. Yours?"

"Gaston de Chanmont. Man-at-Arms to His Grace the Duke of Alberique." He cleared his throat. "Most recently."

There was obviously more to it than that, but Dismas thought better of delving further just now. He picked his way across the square behind Gaston, who moved slowly but steadily under the weight of the iron-framed slab of oak. He noticed a massive stagecoach squatting in the wet earth next to the tavern entrance, and even in torchlight he could see it groaning under the weight of gaudy gold leaf. If Gaston had been thrown through the window, whatever had happened had started near the coach and moved closer to the center of the square. Dismas squinted to see the source of the voices as they drew nearer and the blurry speakers gained definition.

The half-finished statue in the fountain scowled down at a large, loose ring of brightly dressed guards, keeping the interloper pinned between them. Their pikes were longer than the glaive she held, yet boasted smaller blades by far. The woman was similar: outnumbered, yet taller by a head than the tallest of the men. She whipped her head from side to side, murder written on her face in a snarl underlined with blue war paint. Leather and fur kept the cold off, her tunic clicking with the bones sewn onto it. The torchlight set her hair ablaze, a dreadlocked thicket of red tangled from the road and the journey from beyond it. Across her stomach was hung a heavy-looking stone medallion carved in the shape of a skull.

If any woman were going to throw someone of Gaston’s size through a tavern window, Dismas figured she was equal to the task.

“Right,” Dismas said, one hand on his dirk. “If you distract her, I can circle around, slip between the guards, and slip a blade in her back.”

“You will not. She’s in distress enough as it is.” Gaston approached the closest guard and clapped his free hand on his shoulder to get his attention.

Dismas raised an eyebrow at the chips of glass still sticking out of the back of Gaston’s leathers. “She looks like she can take care of herself.”

“We must convince her we mean no harm,” Gaston said firmly, both to Dismas and the guard. The man did a double take, breaking his concentration on the barbarian. “Sir, begging your pardon, but she’s-”

Whatever she was was lost to a keening howl as the woman saw her opening. She dug the butt of her glaive into the earth and vaulted into the air, putting a period on the guard’s sentence with a crunching kick to his jaw. The man stumbled back, cross-eyed and spitting blood, as the others jostled their pikes to close the circle.

Gaston caught the woman by the arm as she descended, holding the tavern door between them to keep her from swinging her glaive around. “Back!” Gaston roared. “Fall back! That’s an order!” Then, to her: “ _Tá tú sábháilte! Ní ghortóimid tú_.”

The woman’s battle cry died in her throat as she came face to face with Gaston. Her glare remained, but it was tinged now with confusion. “ _Níl tú as na Cnoic?_ ”

" _Lig dom a mhíniú. Ná bíodh eagla ort_." Gaston inclined his head toward where he held the woman’s arm, relaxing his grip slightly. Without blinking, she gave the barest of nods. Gaston smiled, letting his hand fall to his side. “ _Cad a thugtar ort?_ ”

She hadn’t lowered her glaive, but she loosened her grip slightly as she studied Gaston. “Eilidh,” she said, tapping her chest with her free fist. “ _Tú?_ ”

“Gaston.” He repeated the gesture, then pointed back at Dismas. “ _Seo_ Dismas.”

Dismas tapped his chest as they had, though he still hadn’t taken his hand off the hilt of his dirk. “Dismas,” he said. It came as close to making sense as anything he’d witnessed that evening. He’d come out expecting a fight, only to witness the man who’d come off worse in it talk down his attacker - a woman, at that. He’d heard of the tribes of the Nine Hundred Hills north of Ronçevar, how they trained boys and girls as warriors from childhood. Taverns and campfires crackled with stories of seven-foot hulks of fur and muscle, more beast than man, who drank wolf blood and razed villages for the fun of seeing them burn.

To Dismas, Eilidh just looked tired. Her tunic was ripped in places and her arms bruised, and here and there small brown cuts marred her skin where she’d been wounded and hadn’t had the time to clean them. Her boots were crude wrappings of cloth and leather that were wearing thin all around and exposed her ankles and feet. Had she walked all the way here in those? Eilidh’s eyes darted furtively about as she and Gaston conversed, as if she expected something else to burst screaming for her blood from the shadows.

“Thy blood runs sinful in your heathen body! By the Light shall it be cleansed!”

Reynauld chose that moment to burst from the shadows in full armor, muscling past the guards with his sword drawn. Eilidh whirled, brandishing her glaive. War shot back into her features, and she barked a challenge. “ _Leabhar! Tar agus bás!_ ”

“Eilidh, _níl!_ ”

Gaston’s plea was lost in the commotion. The ring of guards reformed around Eilidh and Reynauld as they squared off. Reynauld planted his feet and raised his sword, daring Eilidh to approach; Eilidh angled her glaive toward him, anticipating his first move.

He made it. Reynauld took two steps forward, putting his body into a swing that Eilidh saw coming. The night air rang with the meeting of sword and glaive, locked together for a split second as barbarian and knight tested their strength.

One second was enough. A thunk from between them drew their attention to a quivering iron bolt sticking out of the shaft of Eilidh’s glaive. They both looked to see its origin, their enmity sidelined momentarily by curiosity. From behind the fountain, Sarai stepped into view, her crossbow lowered into its firing position. Veruna followed at her heels, unarmed and unamused. “Well, well, well,” Sarai said. “Someone missed the meeting.”

Dismas shouldered aside the lull with a cough. He was developing a knack for that. “Thought Veruna was short on guards,” he said.

Sarai shouldered her crossbow and brushed between two guards. She approached Reynauld and Eilidh, searing them both with a contemptuous glare, and yanked the bolt smartly from its target. “Short doesn’t mean devoid. Our family’s gotten bigger lately, bandit. You ought to get out more.”

As far as Dismas had seen, to Sarai that meant spending the day on a roof waiting for something exciting to happen. Judging by the poor fit of some of the guards’ jerkins, emblazoned with Veruna’s crowned tower, it wouldn’t have been farfetched to assume that these guards were little more than farmers dressed for the occasion. Dismas chose to share neither sentiment, suspecting that Sarai could reconcile both with her arrogance.

“So it’s true.” Sarai tossed the bolt up and down, sizing up the ragged, snarling barbarian that had wandered into their midst; curious, yet unimpressed. “At least one of you Hellions made it. I was told there would be more.” Gaston scowled, but moved to Eilidh’s side and translated for her in a low voice. The Hellion’s eyes widened and she barked a harsh curse and lunged. Gaston’s heavy hand clenched on her shoulder, all that held her back from cutting Sarai down.

“ _Cad a tharla?_ ” he asked her gently.

Eilidh flicked her gaze between Gaston, Sarai, and Reynauld, teeth grinding. She finally took a deep breath and relaxed, her assessment of the situation ruling out further resistance. “ _Thóg an chailleach iad,_ ” she spat. She leaned on her glaive, wincing against her handful of wounds; they’d caught up with her as the rush of combat faded.

Gaston’s tone was grave as he translated. “They were taken by the hag.”

His words rang a bell for Dismas, as did Veruna’s pale, pained expression. It was the same he’d worn when Perrault the caretaker had mentioned the mad prophet they’d all missed in the ruins. He fixed Veruna with a knowing look. “Friend of your uncle’s?”

The count’s mouth was a thin, lipless line. “I believe I owe those present a drink and an explanation. We shall retire to the tavern.” He turned to Gaston. “Sergeant.”

Gaston’s single eye narrowed. “Your Lordship,” he returned with a stiff nod. “It’s Sergeant Major now.”

Veruna made an acknowledging sound that indicated utter apathy. “How things change. You will replace the door, now that it has served its purpose.”

The hectic energy that had animated the square was dying a quick death under the weight of everyone’s relief. Gaston lugged the door back toward the tavern. Eilidh followed at his invitation, seeming satisfied that nobody in town intended to finish what the hag had started. Reynauld was sheathing his sword, sheepishly conceding that the heathen was benign, if damned. Judging by the mirthless smile Sarai wore, she had guessed that he’d drawn that conclusion. As weapons were lowered, as the newcomers trickled back to the tavern, and as the guards trudged back to their posts, movement from near the building drew Dismas’s eye.

That ostentatious gilded coach was rocking slightly as hitherto unknown occupants finally opened the doors. Dismas let his gaze linger as a woman stepped out; she winced as her fine leather boot sank into the mud. She was blonde and wearing a coat of blue felt lined with fur; as she stumbled out of the coach, Dismas was pleasantly surprised to glimpse little else beneath it but silks and jewelry in the important places.

A brunette followed her, similarly dressed and yet not, protected from the weather only long enough to travel between brothels. In all there were six, clustered together and regarding their surroundings with the unease of those who dwelt in such comfort as their employers saw fit to provide. The older woman in red velvet shepherding them toward the doorless tavern entrance must have been that employer.

“Poor girls,” Veruna said, having moved over to Dismas’s side. He put a hand on Dismas’s shoulder and pointed. “See those footprints from the coach to the fountain? They must have picked our Hellion up along the way. No wonder they stayed put until the shouting died down. The painted city women and their barbarian sister…” He chuckled darkly. “Crisis truly does make strange bedfellows.”

Dismas grunted. Rich men talked when there were more important things to do, and talked small when there were bigger things to say. He’d start listening a little closer when Veruna got around to that round on the house. The count squeezed Dismas’s shoulder, sensing that this phase of the conversation was over, and began to follow the others to the tavern.

For all its newfound glamour, the Hello Stranger still hadn’t replaced its broken sign. Civilization was like that, in Dismas’s experience. People tolerated a degree of rot if it was controlled, hemmed in on all sides by newer and more exotic things. Then it wasn’t rot. It was quaint.

Toben’s bag of teeth burned white in the murky grays and browns of Dismas’s memory. Veruna made his way to the tavern, the golden embroidery of his red coat glistering in the torchlight like a beetle before a smoldering campfire. The highwayman followed the count, going as usual where things might start making a little more sense. He watched Veruna from behind, watched the nobleman among the outcasts, and wondered what else this town had yet to discard.


	11. The Resolution

Curses soured the tavern’s air as the tavernkeep worked to preserve its lingering warmth. He was nailing several yards of canvas over the broken window as Dismas entered. Gaston had set the door back in place as ordered, but that seemed to have done nothing for the tavernkeep’s mood. The fighting was over, after all, and the old soldier’s handhold was just a windy hole once more.

The natives had cleared out at some point during the commotion, leaving only the new arrivals and their patron. Veruna’s coat hung over the back of one of the armchairs; the man himself had rolled up his puffy white sleeves to stoke the fire back to coziness. It flared to his satisfaction as Gaston settled into the other armchair once more, relaxing into the felt as the wood beneath grumbled about his bulk.

Eilidh was slouched in a chair next to Gaston, holding her glaive across her knees. She spat on the ground and glared at Sarai, who smirked back and laid Millicent upon the bar with nary a clatter. Reynauld had pulled up a bar stool nearby and was perched on it, looking bewildered as his helmet rested on his lap. His hand still fingered the hilt of his sword, in case Eilidh were to repay his surprise. Chairs were righted, debris swept away, possessions laid down. The sound of the tavernkeep’s hammering offered a continuo to the cacophony of the impromptu meeting.

Dismas saw two more familiar faces - or perhaps just one - shutting the replaced door behind them. Dorothea’s hair was hidden by a pristine wimple, her shapeless brown habit free from her breastplate while off the battlefield. Badu followed at her heels, her book pressed to her chest and her face the usual mystery behind her mask. It wasn’t clear when or whether they’d been invited. Perhaps they had been curious; Badu for certain, though Dismas wasn’t sure the Church allowed it in Dorothea’s case. For a moment he was reminded of his first evening in this awful place, when he’d learned that he and Reynauld weren’t the only ones fool enough to make a home of it.

“Back from the wars?”

Dismas fixed a sidelong glance on Toben, who seemed content where he was. The table was clear save for their tankards. Naturally observant as a thief had to be, Dismas couldn’t help but notice Toben’s bag back at his hip. It was about the size of the bounty hunter’s meaty fist, its burlap too benign a façade for its morbid quarry. “Have you moved at all?” he said.

“Just enjoying the scenery.” Toben cocked a head toward the stairs. “Tavern’s got whores now, did you see? Place is starting to feel like home.”

It had been some time, though Toben’s indolent attitude was spoiling Dismas’s idle desire. “Bad manners not to welcome a guest to our humble home,” he said, pointing over at Eilidh.

Toben let his eyes wander over the Hellion and grunted. “Eh. I didn’t see a bounty on her head.”

“Pretty mouthful of teeth on her, though,” Dismas muttered blackly. His gaze drifted to Toben’s bag and was wrenched away just as quickly.

“Maybe,” Toben said around his tankard before draining it dry. “She’s got plenty of time to give me a reason.”

“Is all our company here?” Dismas hadn’t thought he’d ever be relieved to hear Veruna speak, but he found he was glad for the distraction. The count was seated in the chair across from Gaston, asserting the liege lord’s privilege before the fire while the soldier glowered from the other side of it. "Very well. I won’t bore you with ancient history. The forest-”

The door chose that moment to be thrown wide. Perrault stumbled in, bringing with him the clammy outside and the reek of whatever he’d been rolling in. “ _ Gastoooooon! _ ” he bellowed, drool flying free of his half-toothed grin. He galloped over to the sergeant major, throwing himself at his feet. "They said you'd left for Fendigarh! Savage Fendigarh, where lions with women's faces bathe in rivers of milk! Oh, tell us of the wonders of the Orient!"

A genuinely warm smile crinkled the corners of Gaston's eyes, despite the instinctive twitch of his nose. "All that and more, friend Perrault, in good time. A pleasure to see you once more in this troubled corner of the world." He leaned forward and squeezed the sot's shoulder with his gauntleted hand. "Perhaps a short rest to prepare your nerves for a tale of horror and magics most wild?" said the soldier in a loud, conspiratorial whisper.

Perrault's vigorous nod, overjoyed squeal, and stumbling rush to some upstairs grotto drew a rueful half smile from his employer. "The poor caretaker. I fear his long-standing duties here have…" Veruna drummed his fingers on one arm of his chair. "...Affected him," he finished with a shrug.

"Destroyed him, you mean," Gaston rumbled. He stabbed a finger toward the stairs. "We used to talk poetry and philosophy into the mornings, him and I. That husk is not the friend I left behind. This is your fault, Jehan."

"You underestimate him. His service to my house has never once suffered for it," Veruna said with a wave of his hand. "I am glad that you have returned to continue yours."

"My service is to the people your house slaughtered," Gaston snapped, half rising from his chair. "What remains of them."

"Then you will appreciate the gravity of our situation." The count ably steered the conversation back on course; a necessity, for Gaston's words were stoking the already restive atmosphere in the tavern. "I fear that I have been slow to appreciate its true scope. Some of you have an inkling," he said, glancing in Dismas's direction and away just as quickly. "Others are more intimately acquainted." Here he offered a knowing look to Gaston, who returned it with a fidgeting harrumph. "Forgive my reticence...yet forgive also my ignorance." Veruna paused to find the right words, cracked the knuckles on his right hand.

"My ancestor was avaricious, conniving, and cruel. He spent half his life in hedonism and excess and, when he tired of that, turned to forbidden knowledge."

This was nothing new to anyone present. They'd all gotten the basic rundown when they'd come to town, save for Eilidh, for whom Gaston was quietly translating.

"Herne Veruna was killed by his thirst for forbidden lore. His allies scattered when he fell; the whole damnable lot cowered before whatever nameless horror he discovered in the catacombs below the house. You know of a few...the prophet, wandering the ruins gibbering doom. The necromancer that holds dominion over those same halls."

Dismas actually hadn't heard of that second one, but he supposed it made a grotesque sort of sense, the way one might infer the presence of vultures near a half-eaten corpse.

"What our northerner companion encountered was one of those former...associates."

"The Hag," Sarai cut in, a gleam of intrigue in her eyes. Eilidh shuddered as Gaston translated.

"My ancestor's notes - what I have been able to recover - identified her as one Macette de Rainfaing. A singularly striking woman with an abiding interest in nature and her gifts." Veruna shook his head. "They...consumed her. Her experiments grew more grotesque, more repugnant, until finally she was banished to the weald, where her wildness would be welcomed." The count bowed his head in Eilidh's direction. "I regret that I was not more paranoid. It was foolish of me to think that she would tolerate an incursion upon her barony of blight. I take full responsibility for the fate of your sisters.”

Eilidh turned her head and spat on the rug. She said something in her guttural hill tongue and Gaston leaned closer to hear her. He clucked his tongue and addressed Veruna. “Before the tragedy, the Iron-daughters cleaned out some...ruffians...in the bad part of the forest. I paraphrase, of course. It seems we’ve more than a witch afoot. The brigands are on the move, and beyond their usual stomping grounds.”

The pause that ensued was just long enough for Sarai to interject. "So we're to track down this witch and bring her to justice." She stepped forward, holding a bolt defiantly to her chest. "The wilderness is my home and my toolbox. I volunteer. Any brigands will be bumps in the road compared to her."

"Justice is a luxury we can ill afford," Veruna said with a shake of his head. "Madame Macette was one of my ancestor's most dangerous allies. She respects only power, answers only to her appetite for corruption. If the infestation of my county should spread, it will be by her hand and in the shade of her fell garden.”

“Then count me in.” There was an extended scrape and creak from Sarai’s right as the owner of the voice pushed back his seat. The sound froze Sarai’s expression, sapped the blaze from her resolution. She seemed to be making a visible effort to avoid looking to her right, where Toben was rising from his table. The wreck of his face was its own testimony to the fortunes of his livelihood, which clearly brought in enough to afford the gold teeth his grin exposed. “Never met a witch before. But I’ll wager she ain’t got a spell for a split skull.”

Veruna acknowledged him with a nod. “The bounty hunter. That makes two. I believe you both came on the Douars stagecoach. Are you partners?”

Sarai’s eye twitched. “Acquaintances,” she muttered, still refusing to look at Toben.

“The Hellion’s wounds must be attended to,” Dorothea said, her voice almost lost amid the crackling growl of the fire. “I will see to them while the sisters look to the guards she injured.”

“Dismas?” Veruna asked.

Dismas tried and failed to swallow the tightness gripping his throat. “No,” he choked. “Hell no. I used to run with those arseholes in your forest. Where the grass went brown and the mushrooms came up to your shoulder, that’s where you turned around and went back. That’s the first thing we all learned. Even Vvulf wouldn’t go in there.” The most Dismas recalled ever getting out of the brigand leader was a muttered curse upon “that bitch in the bad trees.” Pieces better left apart were coming together.

Veruna’s smile was understanding, though he looked like he’d expected that answer. “Of course. Forgive my optimism.” Dismas scowled and looked away, though not altogether too incensed at being patronized so. It was like being taunted for refusing a brisk stroll over the cliff Veruna’s estate stood on. “Now, that does cut our pool of candidates down to three. I’m going to have to insist if two of you-”

“I’ll go,” Badu said. She drifted into the circle, two fingers tracing the spine of her journal. The beak of her mask swept this way and that as she studied the group, as if searching for a response. When none came, she continued. “The newest texts in the sanitarium are recent enough to mention the corrupted flora of the weald. I have trouble believing it even now, but some of the mushrooms are supposed to yield vitriol when denatured, by which process-”

“Great,” Dismas threw up his hands. “Saved by the scientist.” Badu’s fingers went rigid on her book, tensed as if with irritation at being interrupted. She flipped it open with a prim shrug and went back to her notes.

Reynauld hopped up from his stool then. “Our fourth shall be-”

“Me.” Gaston cut in as he rose from his seat. “These old bones haven’t seen action since the Mornail Gate.”

Any disappointment at his heroism having been upstaged left Reynauld’s face at the mention of a strategic locale of some nature. “The Mornail Gate?” He was grinning as one who had stumbled upon a long-absent friend. “I would know more, friend soldier. Do you mean the defense of-"

“Our Crusader will stay behind to direct the defense of the town,” Gaston declared with a searching look at Reynauld. “I would talk with you, Churchman, but about other matters.”

Veruna clapped his hands once as he too rose. “A task for everyone, and everyone to their tasks, then. I’ll have Perrault round up the necessary supplies. When can you depart?”

Quite by coincidence, all four volunteers said “Tomorrow,” and that was that.

\--

Though the Hello Stranger had waxed cold from the collateral damage of Eilidh’s arrival, the tavernkeep had managed to keep the warmth from escaping entirely. It would be another few weeks before the window could be repaired; Veruna could afford glass, but wealth could not speed a messenger or expedite a commission. Though the fire had warred admirably with the encroaching outside, it inevitably began to burn low, as much a signal for the gathering to break up as it was a reflection of the meeting’s end.

Sarai only dared to look Toben’s way once he was already halfway up the stairs, settling once more into her easy scowl. She kept that direction in her peripheral vision as she moved to Gaston, who beckoned her over as he spoke to Eilidh. The Hellion had accepted a tankard of ale from a serving girl who dared to creep back out once the discussion had died down. It surprised Sarai not at all that the barbarian polished it off as quickly as she could take it. Bloodthirst bred the regular kind of thirst, especially among the hill people.

“You were speaking her language,” Sarai said to the old soldier. "Where'd you pick it up?"

"I made a hobby of talking to the hillman prisoners when I was stationed at Plus-au-Nord.” Gaston nodded at nothing in particular; in the direction of that ancient stronghold, Sarai guessed. “They were pleasantly surprised, broadly speaking. Not many of the soldiers manning the Marches des Collines even bother." It was more a lament than a boast, judging by his tone. His voice remained soft as he studied Sarai’s face. “Will you and the Vestal escort Eilidh to a warm bed and medical attention?”

The corner of Sarai’s mouth twitched into a smirk. “Seems there’s no love lost between you and the count. Now you give orders on his behalf?” She scanned the room as she spoke. Her challenge found no support from her employer, who had quietly disappeared once the discussion had ended. He had a talent for that. Perhaps he had gone while she had been watching Toben go upstairs to torment the whores.

“Do not mistake my resentment for rebellion,” Gaston said. “Rich men throw bodies at their problems with little regard for the human cost. Yet he at least knows to delegate where his powers are lacking. I intend to make good on his trust, as I did five years ago. The people need a firm hand to get them back on their feet. As does our new friend.” He offered a hand to Eilidh, who hesitated before taking it and standing slowly. “I must stay and talk with our Crusader.”

“Good luck,” Sarai sneered. She didn’t bother lowering her voice as she looked at Reynauld. “You’re stubborn, old man, but you’ll sooner stop a cavalry charge alone than get that one to think.” Reynauld had settled back onto his stool; though his features hardened at the insult, he avoided looking up from his sword, which he was polishing with one of the tavernkeep’s rags.

“Difficult,” Gaston said, “but not impossible. The sanitarium, if you please.” With a tight smile, he squeezed Eilidh’s shoulder and gestured for her to follow Sarai. Dorothea took Gaston’s place at Eilidh’s side as he moved toward Reynauld, ignoring Sarai’s grimace.

The blade of Reynauld’s longsword gleamed in the low light of the fire and what was left of the candles, but still he scrubbed at it with the oily rag. He looked up at Gaston with a tentative smile as the older man approached. “Well met, Sergeant Major,” he said. “Forgive my preoccupation. Reynauld de la Foi, a humble servant of the Light and her Church.”

“Gaston de Chanmont.” The Man-at-Arms breezed over his introduction and got straight to the point. “You’re lucky you're alive, you know. Eilidh called you  _ leabhar -  _ book.”

Reynauld looked puzzled, wearing the sort of expression that suggested absolute innocence in the wake of the worst trespasses. “As in the Good Book? Do the Hellions normally do that?”

“That’s what the  _ Boudiccaeans  _ call the men who invaded their lands. They have little love for the Church. They and their sister tribes still recall the Northern Crusade.”

"Surely not. None remain who fought in it."

Gaston took a deep breath, let it out slowly, moderating his response to Reynauld’s blitheness. "My sixtieth summer has been and gone, Reynauld. My grandfather was sixty when I was a lad, and when he was a lad he saw High Chief Ruadri dragged over stones by his fellows, by men dressed much as you are. Living memory is not so far off, and it carves wounds deeper than those it felt."

Reynauld stopped polishing the sword and considered this for more than a minute. Gaston watched the Crusader carefully, searching for a struggle in his rugged face. If there was one, he had mastered the art of hiding it, whether through indoctrination or rationalization. Likely both, Gaston surmised. The younger man's expression was one of unadulterated regret, and probably even heartfelt at that.

"Their souls are condemned already," Reynauld said in a low voice. "What happens to their bodies is not truly the concern of the demons they worship. Forsake the Light's mercy, and one is left to ask mercy of Her children."

"A man can get drunk on war easy as ale, and with a thousand companions to egg him on in the drinking." Gaston narrowed his eye. "You expect mercy of your brother Crusaders in the heat of a sack?"

"Thus the dilemma of the heathen. In the end, we are only human.” He sheathed his sword and shrugged. “But the hour grows late, and my strength is only just returned. You have the right of it. I shall assist in the training of the town guard tomorrow, as you are bound for the weald. Men of our experience must impart it, no?” Reynauld was not one to take advantage when someone was rendered speechless; to him, the conversation had progressed as far as it might, and was due to give way to more pressing matters.

How galling sincerity could sometimes be; how dishonest restraint. At Reynauld’s age, Gaston wouldn’t have hesitated to belt the Crusader right off of his stool. A long life had taught him bitter lessons about how men’s hearts were hardened, about how they might sometimes be softened. Conviction blinded men to dissent from the obvious places. Eilidh too was human, after all, and if Reynauld’s eyes were to be opened to that, it would be through some unpredictable providence novel only to him.

Gaston merely grunted a farewell as Reynauld nodded his own and strode humming from the tavern. Decades of war for the sake of peace, decades more of preaching mercy to the merciless, had not quite beaten the sense of responsibility out of the old man for the Way Things Were.

That was why he had come back to d’Auseil, after all.


End file.
